Broadcom Service Virtualization Reviews

I think the most valuable feature is the ability to quickly create simulations of APIs that you use to disconnect you from your dependencies as part of your testing process.

We've really done two different scenarios. One is the creation of a new API. We were able to create a simulation before we ever wrote a line of code, and so all of our customers who would use that gave us direct feedback very quickly. In a performance environment, we have lots of dependencies, lots of services that we talk to. Having the simulations gave us the ability to run test when we want rather than when they're available.

The things that we're interested mostly are deployment kinds of capability. We would like to deploy these simulators as part of our continuous deployment process. We would like to be able to auto-deploy them as part of the test mechanism to help test teams without having to set up the infrastructure in advance.

6 months.

We've had no issues with the stability of the solution, had no problems at all in the six months we've had it deployed.

One of the requirements that we had early on was the ability to handle high transaction rates. Our target was 700 transactions a second. We were just able to prove with our mix of services over 750 so very, very comfortable.

This is one development group. We have lots of different groups that are standing at the doorway to get in. It's a very exciting time.

We didn't use technical support during the evaluation. We've used it a lot since, mostly to try and fix things that we didn't quite understand properly, not bug fixes.

Listening to our executives, one of the key difficulties that the development teams were having is the ability to test faster, so they can't deliver content faster to our customers because they can't test fast enough mostly because of these dependencies and the outside suppliers. Having a service virtualization solution gives us the ability to disconnect ourselves from our suppliers and those blocking dependencies, allows us to go faster.

We're not really KPI-driven. It's really can we allow the team to test without the dependencies where they weren't able to do that before?

One of the reasons we picked the product was it was easy to set up. We signed our contract at the end of May, and we had our production instance up and running in the second week of June, so it was very easy to set up and it's been running solid since.

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.

The most valuable feature for us is that it provides configuration settings to make connections to the DB and web services. Because it has pre-written code exposed through an UI, it makes it much easier to configure tests.

It's helped with our automation testing.

• UI testing could be improved.
• Also, it should have predefined plug-ins to integrate with other automation tools to help in tool-chain enablement.

We've used it for four years.

There were no issues with deployment.

Although the initial products were highly unstable, there is still room for improvement in versions 7.5/8/10.

It's scalable in terms of running a performance test because it supports limited virtual users.

5/10 - The worst thing is the training provided by iTKO/CA as it's very costly and not comprehensive.

7/10

We previously used SoapUI and this is much easier to configure.

The initial setup was straightforward.

ROI typically comes over a longer duration (both Service Virtualization and Release Automation), although its significant in terms of overall project cost when taking into account hardware, testing delays, and third-party dependencies.

It’s very expensive and to really come out with an ROI, it takes years.

We compared it to our existing solution at the time, SoapUI.

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.

It's got a standardized format for endpoints as well as containerized, virtualized endpoints that are used by everyone on our team. We can spin up these endpoints if necessary.

We're still working with it, but it's given us a common deliverable. The overall testing strategy allows us to have more common strategies amongst various products.

The user interface and usability of the tool is not the best. They could definitely be improved upon in the next release.

Also, we are hamstrung by different releases and are not using all of the features, but it is useful.

It’s not stable as of yet, as it needs a lot of infrastructure.

We haven't done so yet, but we're hoping it will be scalable.

We interact with an internal department that works between CA and ourselves. They have all of the info we need.

I think we were just using many different tools to achieve the same thing. We needed one tool to do it all, and this fit the bill.

The initial setup was straightforward.

You should make an overall testing plan, otherwise it’s difficult to implement quickly.

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.

One of the key benefits is that it really reduces the need for an organization to have all these backend infrastructure systems which are very, very costly to actually procure and to maintain. Service Virtualization allows you to test without actually having physical backends there. It pretends that they're there.

By virtualizing application services, you can actually give them to whoever needs to use it. They make a request, get a response, and they use the application without even knowing that it's not connected to a real live system in the backend.

One of the things I like about it is it actually does what it claims to do. It virtualizes application services. A lot of the times companies come in with their glossies and all this kind of stuff, and they put it up on a nice presentation, and they tell you all about it. Then we try to do it, and it just doesn't do it.

This product just works really, really well.

The problem is getting the developers to do more than just hooking into QA backends. They don't do integrated testing so that the first time you bump into an integrative problem is when it hits our QA environment, which are integrated. They discover a defect later on down the cycle and it's more costly to fix. The developers are not finding their own bugs and fixing them.

This tool would allow them to do simulated integration tests without having all this backend infrastructure. They can run on it so we build the services for them, but they're not using it for that capability because it hasn't been presented it to them in that way.

So really the biggest area of improvement is just in terms of who CA should be focusing the tool's use. It would be best to focus on the developers.

It was purchased from another larger corporate project and just kind of sat there, paid for but on the shelf. What happened was the maintenance comes up once a year, and our VP says, "You know, I'm paying 250 grand for this thing. Who's used this?"

We've been running one server for a couple years now. This year we've decided to spread our wings a little, and we're going to procure four more. It can replicate one setup on all five servers, or replicate five different setups, one on each.

The support is there when we need it.

We've had this one for several years, but we just started using over the last two years or so. No other options were used.

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.

The most valuable feature is definitely how quickly you can get up and mock something that’s not completely done. It’s very easy and it's extensible. You can add any custom logic that you need.

It decreases a lot of bottlenecks when you’re stuck waiting on a downstream service to get done. We don’t lose so much time and money on that. With Service Virtualization, we can get rid of all that and develop a UI without waiting on all those. It increases production and decreases lost time.

It has awesome stability, and we haven’t had any problems. Once you get it up and running, it stays up and running. The only thing that happened was that the enterprise dashboard hung up, but rebooting fixed the problem. This has only happened on super rare occasions, only two or three times.

We’re still in the baby steps of implementation, but with the teams we have, we can write one service that multiple teams can use. As we continue to grow, we know we can write one thing that multiple teams can use and it will grow with us.

We have on-site meeting and emails, and they were very professional and responsive, usually within an hour. Our technical account manager helps.

I was not involved initially, but I am involved in upgrades with enterprise dashboard and writing instructions on upgrading client dashboards. I haven’t heard anything bad about initial setup, though.

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.

1. By virtualization, for all dependent services, we are able to create isolated test environments.
   
2. We virtualize fragile services and deploy them with the 'Failover' mode so that we can fall back to the VS in case the real service returns an error.
3. We virtualize third-party paid services, as well as in-development services, to minimize costs and delays.

In short, we are able to save a lot of valuable time. Testers and developers no longer complain about not having access to dependent services. We don't have to share/reserve resources or worry about our development being blocked by unavailable services.

The ability to create virtual services and deploy them as Docker containers, and include them in our Jenkins build pipelines, is a valuable feature.

It was critical for us to prevent possible elements from "unnecessarily" breaking the pipeline. If I'm pushing a particular web service through the pipeline and want that to be tested in isolation, it is a big problem if everything fails due to an irrelevant dependent service.

The use of containers provided a very flexible solution.

The workstation component has a very out-dated UI and is in dire need of a facelift.

There are too many fragmented web components that could easily and logically be merged. For example, Service Catalog, Enterprise Dashboard, Portal, and Identity and Access Manager are all separate web applications. Why not merge them in one web app?

This is a very mature and very stable product, although error prevention could be added into the product, for the sake of improving user-friendliness.

The idea of Virtual Service Environments (VSE) makes the product extremely scalable. Especially with the use of containers, you won't have concerns about resource wastage.

This solution has first-class support, and it couldn't be any better.

I used HPE SV before. It was very user-friendly but cannot be compared with CA DevTest, as it lacks a lot of the important features.

This initial setup of this solution is not straightforward at all. The installation is unnecessarily complex. Again, user-friendliness is not an area that CA DevTest can boast about.

It helps us to remove barriers that we have with dependencies on services that we don't own, or services that don't even exist yet, or services that are junky. It helps us to shift left and do our development earlier without waiting on those dependencies to be available.

I work in a test environment so teams come in and they do performance testing on their solutions. Whenever we can get their solution to work with DevTest it makes everything super quick. It reduces setup time, all the engineering you have to go through, and reduces it by days.

You can create virtual services from a live recording or you can even take raw traffic and convert that into request/response pairs, and you can create an entire virtual service from just those simple little files, and that's super awesome when that all works out.

I think the size of DevTest is pretty massive. It's hard to tell what different parts of it can be used to do different things. It gets kind of big, so if they could modulize it more, and lead you to a common work flow, that would be pretty awesome.

They're constantly making improvements, so it's gotten better every time they have released a new version.

It's very stable. It's very reliable.

We spread it out across, I think, 12 different teams using it right now, and no problems.

I have used tech support. They're awesome. They usually get back within minutes if you have a problem and they can get you up and running really quickly.

I was surprised, because usually customer service is not that prompt. But I've used it probably seven times, and every time has been an easy, quick experience. 

There's definitely a learning curve, but they're there with you on site, helping you get set up. At least in our case they were with us, so that removed a lot of the problems.

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. 

The most valuable feature is the ability to virtualize almost any web service which allows us to perform testing and speed up our development.

It’s helped us in a number of ways. In addition to helping with testing and development, it has also allowed us to create a training environment that allows our agents to work on the latest changes to our software almost instantly.

My fallback would be scalability.

Oddly, when my capacity folks pull stats memory and CPU both show within normal limits. My users, app administrator, however, see degradation during peak periods.

We're working with our capacity management engineers and our CA SV specialist to analyze the performance stats and recommend a temporary solutions. I'm planning to upgrade to v10 in 2017, so I'm going to insure we have h/w that supports current needs and v10 +24 months.

The solution is very stable. We have not had any issues.

Scalability is the reason I rated it as 8/10. We’re going through some challenges with scalability right now. CA is helping us to get through that.

I have used technical support and they are generally very, very good. Sometimes it takes a while to get through the queue to get to the right person, but that’s just because they’re very busy.

We were not using another solution. We were doing manual stubbing. Developers were creating their own mini-virtualizations and this tool has helped us create them.

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?