I would recommend this product to others who are interested in using it.

I would rate Broadcom Service virtualization a nine out of ten.

This is for those who are looking for tools where they would really like to leverage the service installation piece. One tool doing service installation. One tool carrying out performance testing. One tool carrying out functional testing. And if they want to not write performance testing specifically and instead leverage the functional test, I think this would be a tool to be considered.

It is a very good tool with support for a variety of protocols and has a user-friendly UI and other scripting features as well. I will give it a rating of nine out of ten.

I would rate it pretty highly. It would be close to 10 out of 10 for how it helped solve our needs.

For me, the number one criteria while selecting a vendor are the features of the product. The next factor involved is how other clients are making use of it because we cannot afford to spend time to find out new features or bugs in the tool. So, these are really important factors and I would like to make sure it fits our needs.

Creating a virtual service is a matter of ten minutes. It depends on the complexity of the service, like the mainframe virtualization such as CICS or database virtualization, where there are some agents involved that take a day or two. It is simple. The only thing is that the developer of the service should have some technical idea involved as to how the service works and finding the right URL. That is important.

Get the right level of buy-in from your organization. Understand how to get people to adopt it, rather than focusing on what it does because the "what", everybody gets. Everybody knows what it does and how it can benefit you. It's making sure you've understood your organization and how you've got to convince people to change and adopt it. It's a whole new journey on how to get new tools into a company. It could be SV. It could be anything. That was a big learning curve for us. We didn't get the right people on board to buy into it. It's just beating your head against the wall internally to try and make change. You couldn't understand why anybody else wouldn't want it? I get it now. Convincing others was the biggest challenge I had.

Jump in and play around with it, and you'll get it easily.

Where I see Service Virtualization and Release Automation coupled is at the point of some type of environment testing. I'm going to be doing testing, so I'm either doing my testing in development, or I'm doing my testing in QA. Those are the most obviously common places we're going to be doing that. There's integration testing, but I don't necessarily have all the systems readily available to me for function up and running. Or sometime we literally might have an outage while they're updating the middleware call, so maybe it's important for offshore to be getting their testing done.

The ability to swap in or hook in virtualized services so that you can keep your testing going is important, so when you're doing the deployment, you could have your setups configured such that you say whether or not you need to select a given endpoint to be pointing to a virtualized service or the live service. I think it's important that you know how that data plays together, and which systems or maybe there's a group of them. You can't simply change one service. Maybe I have to have all three of them virtualized, running all the virtualized ones in one situation because of the way the data works.

This whole idea that you don't necessarily have to have a full end to end environment to get people functioning is important. 

What’s been the key is to get people embracing it are seeing what Service Virtualization can do for them.

Regarding the virtualization capabilities, I remember when I saw them and I thought I knew exactly how I was going to use it. Training was one of those things that I took to the business that actually triggered a statement by one of our sales operations people who said this changes how we hire people. That caught me off guard, I didn't expect it, but it made sense once we talked about it a little bit more.

I'm a software developer, I just want to get in and start working with it. I just wanted to get my hands on it. I want to work with it, touch it, and feel it. 

When discussing changes in how we hire, we always had to think about all the type of training that they had to do. There's weeks of training as you're hiring people, but you don't always have the time to spend four or five weeks training people. The ability to have those training disciplines right there, and not having to maintain a whole end to end, which is almost impossible, and you're never up to date with that type of scenario, that's a huge win. Of all the products, I think Service Virtualization is the easiest one to sell and the easiest one to get your arms around as to why there's a benefit, and I was able to sell it quite readily into the company for those very reasons.

One of the things that we just have come across here is that you setup a training environment, but depending on how a company does their projects, if you're going to start something and put training in it, then you need to make sure you also stay committed to it so that it get enhanced. You need to work closer to the business, so that they have a sense of the value, and you need to make sure that it's factored into the project work. A lot of the time development teams just think about how to code new features but we also need to worry about operational, meaning whether I'm relying on my release automation tools. Questions like, how do I integrate, how's my apps being monitored, how easy is it to test them, if an issue comes up, how quickly can they detect it?

There's so many good things that Service Virtualization can do, and almost everybody suffers from the same thing with middleware teams who aren't responding quickly to them. You’re on different cadences of when things can be released, and just trying to have stable environments. Service Virtualization can help work around some of those challenges.

For the service virtualization, especially, a lot of times, we are asked to stand up environments and those will take time; you have to purchase hardware and software. I think if they start looking to CA SV as a solution, we can stand it up rapidly and usually solve the situation in a short order of time, saving both green dollars and hours of setup, for the particular hardware database, whatever you're trying to setup.

My rating reflects the flexibility that it gives, the easy deployment and the easy maintenance of it. It is probably one of the better tools on the market for virtualization. I've seen several.

When selecting a vendor what's important to us is 

• a relationship with the vendor
• their response to us in a timely manner and
• especially, their being established, having proven their solution with other clients.

I give it an eight out of 10, based on our experience so far. Once we use it at full scale, we'll come to know if there are any more improvements or challenges that need to be addressed.

I would tell colleagues to keep CA as the number one priority to research because they are the market leader and have the most experience, based on our research. I think they should be one of the top contenders for service virtualization.

You should try to do a PoC and then go through different use cases in order to understand where exactly this tool is applicable in your enterprise.

Definitely look at the capabilities of your application initially. Everything depends on that. I can say that Service Virtualization really helps you to reduce time spent testing, and improves the quality in the agile process. If you are not using this, I advise you just have a look. Definitely you'll like it, and you'll implement it.

Work closely with a CA partner in their Service Virtualization channel to get your in house resources ramped up on CA Service Virtualization. Expect this to take time and require investment in professional services, training and mentoring.

My personal opinion is that the tool is really good as a service virtualization solution rather than a service testing tool.

I would rate it an 8/10. From a capabilities perspective it's there. Like I mentioned, the learning curve can be a little high. Usability in the prior version that we used, version 8.2, usability is not great. That's why I give it an eight. It requires a Thick Client, so we need to install that on the machine. It's not the most intuitive UI ever, so we'd like to see it improved a little bit from that perspective. I know that they're coming out with version 9, which is supposed to improve that quite a lot, so I'll be looking forward to that.

What we start off with is that we had what we called a enter of excellence that comprised of a few very technical individual to try out the platform, to install the software, and be the product expert within the organization. Then what we did is that we pretty much scaled the development of the virtual services to other teams and that have more of a knowledge of how the service is supposed to behave, so that the COE doesn't need to be in all of these type of sessions and what not. We actually used the start out small and then use that team to empower other teams to actually be able to develop their virtual services that way.

Do your homework, do what’s right for your organization. While the tools try to be one size fits all. They each do something better than the other and you have to pick one that fits your IT organization.

I would advise others who are looking for a similar solution to go for this product.

The main criteria while selecting a vendor is being a market leader who is number one in providing a solution for the problems/issues, which we are currently facing. That's the reason why we chose CA as they are market leaders for the product.

The product is good but there is some improvement required such as an automated way for creating those features which we are awaiting in the next release.

Not many people know that even in the development space, developers can utilize this solution to perform some of their unit testing, before they get into real interfaces. This awareness is not there in the market. We use this product in performance and functional testing, so probably even in unit testing the developers could use it. Thus, we would strongly recommend to explore this tool and its functionalities.

The most important criteria while choosing a vendor is primarily its performance track record in the market and the range of solutions they provide across lifecycles. Another important aspect is the ability to interface with multiple solutions that are available in the market.

I guess to sum up, you will need to engage with CA to understand what the right virtualization is, to ensure that you're not wasting your time.

I would say that you need to have good buy-in at the enterprise level, you need to have good buy-in at your director-plus level.

Our services are offered to all of our clients. Once they have purchased the product, we offer services and centrally configure this for others who have this feature. It's free. Instead of each and every project team buying their own products, we centrally buy it, we centrally manage the environment, and we provide it to the rest of the teams. This provides a way of cost-cutting and interacting.

This solution is definitely for large enterprise companies, not suitable for a small or medium-sized company. With large enterprise companies, we can use freeware tools. There are several freeware tools available.

Complex protocols are also available and can be applied only for large enterprise companies.

My recommendations are that this solution is best suited for large organizations and for internally running their referral services. If you want, the requirements are simple.

You can use the freeware that is available. Or, if you want to use it for a central log, then use it, develop and enhance it more. The development technicians will assist you if you want to run this securely as a centralized enterprise-level solution.

I would recommend this solution for large organizations. Nonetheless, they have to make a lot of improvements.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

I would definitely rate it as a nine. Simply because I think any product obviously has some inherent flaws in it. That is the reason why they are upgraded. It would be foolish to say it is a 10 right off the bat. 

We are using this program, so I would try to use it the same way, This is not to advertise, but educate others. If you see any constraint in your testing or deployment, this solution can really help you in moving forward

The CA community will help us with any difficulties with the implementation. You can find it https://communities.ca.com/places.

You have to go check this tool out.

The innovation is amazing. CA has continued to add to services that it supports, the transports that it supports, and has built all of the enterprise capabilities into the product as well.

Most important criteria when a selecting a vendor: service and support. Pricing is right up there, too.

Give it a try.

Set up a central maintenance team, a CoE, but let the users use it themselves. That way, you’ll get more value out of the investment.

The product is easy to use and offers lots of functionalities. This product also supports the most protocols, compared to its competitors.

We initially started with a small proof of concept. For a product like this, that's what you would normally do. With that proof of concept being successful, we migrated to supporting an entire organization within the bank that I was working at at the time. We took that solution from there to actually doing an enterprise deal and now pushing it across the entire company.

The product is obviously key. You want a product that meets the needs that you have. The other thing is the service that I get provided by those people that are coming in. Whether it's the sales or some of the pre-sales folks that are coming in. The support that I'm getting from them, the responsiveness that I'm getting from that, is critical. If you don't have a company that's going to be good to you when they're trying to sell something to you, they're not going to be good to you when they're supporting you later. That's all obviously been key for me.

In terms of the value that we were able to get out of the tool, I would definitely probably give it a nine. The only reason I wouldn't push for a ten is ... When we initially got the product, we were growing and the product was growing at the same time, so there were some things that had to be tweaked and some support we needed that wouldn't have made it a ten out of the box tool. I would say where we got it and the way we were able to use it, that definitely pushed it to a ten. Out of the box, I would say I felt like it was a strong nine product.

I would say if you've had the engagement with the CA tool and you've heard the sales presentations and you've heard all the hoopla about what the tool will do, know that what they say it will do, it does. It does it very well. From a market standpoint, it does it as a market leader. Overall, I haven't had any complaints with the tool in terms of the organizations that we've deployed the tool, they love what the tool has done for them in terms of their development, their development cycles, and the quality of the testing and the coding they've been able to do using the tool.

Not in terms of comparing it with a different solution, but realize that it is a disruptive tool in terms of the initial deployment. They need to understand it's going to take some heavy lifting. If their philosophy on deploying a tool is stand it up and everybody's going to come to you and want to use it, that's a poor solution and poor thought process. It is a tool that you're going to have to actively work to deploy. If you put together a strategy around deploying the tool and you do the work, the tool will get you the gains and the advantages and the saving that you're looking for in your organization.

I think it's great to hear what the industry is saying, what peers in the industry are saying is important. Some of our pain points generally are about the same. If they're showing how they can use the tool, how it's be successful for them, it is definitely something I want to hear.

I would give CA an eight out of ten. It could be a ten on service virtualization, but it's definitely a 6 or 7 in the application testing area. These two are combined into one product (CA DevTest), so the overall total comes to an 8.

When selecting a vendor, our most important criteria is based on which areas are supported. As we are an enterprise, we have rich environments with many types of platforms and the most important requirement is that the tools will support these rich environments, protocols, technologies, and platforms.

In the end, your choice depends on what goal is more important to you: services virtualization or application tests. If it's services virtualization, go for DevTest; if it's application testing, then you should think twice.

My advice would be to look at the solution in detail, as it can fill a big gap in your testing. It, of course, does require tech knowledge to work, but for what it delivers, it’s worth it.

Get your business partners on board. Do an ROI analysis where you can actually have concrete use cases to sell the value of the product.

We really disconnected ourselves from the IT department. They run the infrastructure. It's then very stable and performant. Most of the administration is done by the engineering team itself, product engineering.

This solution is very valuable in terms of being able to speed up. One of the primary capabilities was the ability to consume it by our teams. How hard is it to learn? How hard is it to set up? Of the three vendors in the evaluation, the CA Service Virtualization was the easiest license model and the easiest to stand up and configure.

I've never really given anybody a 10 so I give them a 9. It's done everything it said it would do. We've got great consumption, early acquisition of the product. Support has been fantastic as we hope it would. The user interface is easy to learn. All of the things we set out as objectives have been met in the primary deployment.

CA Service Virtualization is an amazing solution, very easy to use, easy to train others on how to take advantage of it. I'd say jump on it.

It’s a good product, but comes with a hefty cost. If there is a better licensing/cost negotiation, then it can work, otherwise it’s not a viable solution. Some of the in-house products can beat this with limited cost investment.

I’d compare it to open-source solutions that already exists. Consider your organization before diving deep. For us, we are building up our maturity, and this solution is built to a higher standard.

I would suggest that you do a proof of concept. Get it in your shop and try it out. See what you like. Look at other tools and compare them. IBM has got I think a tool called Green Hat. Hit the big guys that sell software like that, and do proofs of concept to make your own decision.

Use the web portal that allows you to develop services without actually buying the product. You can go in there and test it.

Nothing can be perfect, but it’s definitely really close. The documentation is awesome, but tutorial-based instructions would be helpful.

We had one of CA’s engineers come on site and work with us for one week and that sped up our use of it more efficiently.

I give it an eight out of 10, because nothing is ever perfect, and there's definitely a learning curve to it. But if you put some time into it, it definitely helps you out. 

I definitely recommend going down the path of service virtualization. The payback is almost immediate.

When selecting a vendor, I look for reliability, honesty, and price. I don't look for the cheapest, but I look for the best value. What are they offering? What does it cost to get that? Can I get a return on investment from it?

Potential users need to clearly know what they want, how they want to implement it, and how they want to use it. Then, once they have clarity, they can figure out how they want to set up the solution and go from there.

Make sure you understand the potential of the solution and that it will take time to make it work.

It's a good product for virtualization, but the price is high although we won’t regret it for this product.

Without trying other products in the service virtualize space, I feel very comfortable working with this product. It does its job well, is not difficult to use and grasp, and the support is very good. I would definitely recommend this product!

I would recommend this product for clients who are heavy on web services. This product is very easy to learn, implement, and configure.

I would recommend others to use CA Service Virtualization for all their virtualization needs as it is easy to use and the support provided via the CA Communities is also great.

Just go with it, if you don’t have constraints regarding price; it is the best. Otherwise, for simple virtual services, go for SoapUi Pro. Rule out the others.

QTP can achieve almost everything to do with scripting testing. Other tools like SoapUI/Jmeter being more popular become the obvious choice.

Think “outside the box” when you think about how this product can be used. Don’t just think it can emulate systems because it can do much, much more.

I'd like to see more features integrate with the CICD pipeline via APIs or command line etc.

I'd also like better ocumentation on live scenarios with more examples etc. as mentioned earlier.

We're getting into the lean and agile process and one of the problems we have is the testing and delivery time frame. We're looking to improve the overall quality of the product. The code helped the efficiency of our programmers in the overall process.

I suggest just getting in and start using it. That is the best case scenario for us, to actually start proving the concept.

When selecting a vendor, I would look at support, the functionality of the product, and how well it performs. I would suggest starting small, take it in small chunks, and just start using it.

Can't wait to see the integration w/ Shunra, Nolio and Grid Tools in the near future!

When selecting a vendor, our criteria, what we are looking for are 

• easy to use tools
• a good feature set
• and then awesome support.

I would say it's an eight out of 10. Eight because it has so much going on and there's a lot to learn, and there are a lot of things you can do with the tool. It requires quite a lot of learning effort. It's not plug and play. And a lot of customization has to go into it.

I would advise going with DevTest, definitely. It would depend on what you are looking to get out of the tool. If it's some of the basic protocols like HTTP, HTTPS, you could actually do it yourself. But if you're looking at a much larger scale, then definitely DevTest is the right tool to go ahead with.

Over the past 3 years which I've been using it, I've found it to be a good solution. Only drawback is price, setup & maintenance.

It's important to have a group that really learns and understands service virtualization well. You can then leverage them for any teams that want to implement SV.

I believe this product will meet your expectations if you’re looking for automated testing solution for any of the supported technologies. It also offers other major functionalities such as CAI for transaction recording and automated generation of test cases and virtual services which we’re planning to use.

It's better than I would've originally anticipated. Just understand there is a slight ramp-up, but once you get past that, the value is really there. I think, wow, we can do a lot of stuff, save a lot of time, and save a lot of money.

Definitely read the documentation. The documentation is pretty good.

It is a very good solution as it covers most of the transport and data protocols. The process of creating a virtual service is pretty straightforward and easy. The only drawback for this tool is its license cost.

I'm looking forward to testing Devtest 8.0.2 and the new ideas. I've been impressed so far.

Just go for this product if its features are capable of meeting your requirements.

If you want to implement something at the enterprise level, then this is an appropriate tool, not something that is open-source or free. Think about how it integrates with other solutions and the product’s reliability. Also, you’ll need professional support for such a solution.

Very easy to learn and implement. Doesn't require extensive technical knowledge. Use virtual services instead of stubbed data.

I give it between an eight and a nine out of 10. I don't ever really give 10s, because I always think that things can be improved, so it's a great product.

It does what it promises. I would definitely recommend to take a look at this solution, because of the ease of it.

When looking for a vendor, functionality and the user experience are the most important criteria. It has to be easy to use or people aren't going to use it.

Be patient and understanding will come. It's new functionality and all tools work a little bit different.

Read the manuals and practice a lot.

If you are using this for automation of web services, we found it hard to have a customized solution.

It’s provided value. We’ve been able to continue development even when we wouldn’t previously have been able to continue. There’s been a learning curve, some hiccups, and a challenge to train new people on the solution. There is some barrier to entry.

It loses points in documentation. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff out there, but the out-of-the-box documentation is lacking.

The features are really good in the middleware testing world. It supports lots of technologies. I would strongly recommend this tool for Automation and Virtualization. It's a good tool for QA developers.

It's a good product, try it out.

Make sure development gets involved. It’s more valuable the earlier it’s used in a dev cycle.

Very good tool. Go for it...

• High initial learning curve
• Benefits in system testing through virtualization

When deciding which service virtualization vendor to go with, experience is the most important thing.

Benchmark the tools, ask your peers, ask about people’s field experiences. I think that's what I'd do.

From a business perspective, CA was a good deal.

I always recommend this tool.

It's one of the best products for SOA testing, virtualization, and middleware.

It a great tool for simulating the service.

Easy to implement with lot of built-in features.

CA technical support and DevTest community people love to respond and come up with a number of suggestions, which is really appreciated.