Service Virtualization: Reality Is Overrated

Service Virtualization: Reality Is Overrated

by John Michelsen, Jason English
Released September 2012
Publisher(s): Apress
ISBN: 9781430246718

Read it now on the O’Reilly learning platform with a 10-day free trial.

O’Reilly members get unlimited access to books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.

Start your free trial

Book description

Software drives innovation and success in today's business world. Yet critical software projects consistently come in late, defective, and way over budget. So what's the problem?

Get ready for a shock, because the answer to the problem is to avoid reality altogether. A new IT practice and technology called Service Virtualization (SV) is industrializing the process of simulating everything in our software development and test environments. Yes, fake systems are even better than the real thing for most of the design and development lifecycle, and SV is already making a huge impact at some of the world's biggest companies.

Service Virtualization: Reality Is Overrated is the first book to present this powerful new method for simulating the behavior, data, and responsiveness of specific components in complex applications. By faking out dependency constraints, SV delivers dramatic improvements in speed, cost, performance, and agility to the development of enterprise application software.

Writing for executive and technical readers alike, SV inventor John Michelsen and Jason English capture lessons learned from the first five years of applying this game-changing practice in real customer environments. Other industries—from aviation to medicine—already understand the power of simulation to solve real-world constraints and deliver new products to market better, faster, and cheaper. Now it's time to apply the same thinking to our software.

For more information, see servicevirtualization.com.

What you'll learn

You will learn why, when, where, and how to deploy service virtualization (SV) solutions to mitigate or eliminate the constraints of an unavailable or unready service system by simulating its dependent components in order to deliver better enterprise software faster and at lower cost. In particular, you will learn step-by-step why, when, where, and how to deploy the following SV solutions:

  • shift-left

  • infrastructure availability

  • performance readiness

  • test scenario management

    • Who this book is for

    This book is not only for IT practitioners on engineering, testing, and environments teams engaged in the development and delivery of enterprise software, but also for executives of companies in all sectors who need to understand and implement emergent opportunities to improve the time to market and overall competitiveness of any outward-facing business strategy that has a software application component.

    Table of contents

    1. Titlepage
    2. Contents
    3. About the Authors
    4. About the Technical Reviewer
    5. Acknowledgments
    6. Prologue: Virtually There at Fedex®
    7. Chapter 1: Introduction
      1. Service Virtualization Defined
      2. You Make the Transformation Happen
      3. About This Book
      4. Signposts in the Book
    8. Chapter 2: The Business Imperatives: Innovate or Die
      1. Consumers Have No Mercy
      2. Business Demands Agile Software Delivery
      3. Increased Change and Complexity Are Inevitable
      4. Business Software Cannot Sustain without Simulation
    9. Chapter 3: How We Got Here
      1. From Monolithic to Composite Apps
      2. Today’s Complex Service Environments
      3. From Waterfall to Agile Development
    10. Chapter 4: Constraints: The Enemy of Agility
      1. In-Scope vs. Out-of-Scope
      2. Unavailable Systems and Limited Capacity
      3. Conflicting Delivery Schedules
      4. Are developers coding in the blind?
      5. Data Management and Volatility
      6. Third-Party Costs and Control
      7. Stubs and Mocks Are Not Enough
    11. Chapter 5: What Is Service Virtualization?
      1. The Other Half of Virtualization
      2. Creation of a Virtual Service
      3. Options for Creating and Maintaining Virtual Services
      4. What Can You Make into a Virtual Service?
      5. Virtual Environments Are Better than Real Environments for Dev and Test
      6. Wait a minute—is this Virtual Service Environment replacing the live environment all the way up to production?
    12. Chapter 6: Capabilities of Service Virtualization Technology
      1. “Live-Like” Development Environment
      2. Automation Eliminates Manual Stubbing and Maintenance
      3. Virtual Service, Heal Thyself
      4. Enables Parallel Dev and Test
    13. Chapter 7: Where to Start with Service Virtualization?
      1. IT Executives Must Manage and Incentivize SV, or It Won’t Happen
      2. A transition may be painful—so how do I break this to my teams?
      3. Identify Stakeholders (The SV War Council)
      4. Who Should Use Service Virtualization First?
      5. Set Real Value Goals for Releases
      6. How does my company expect to create value from Service Virtualization?
      7. Avoid Inappropriate Technologies
      8. SV does not replace your ALM software
      9. More than a simplistic “record-playback” tool
      10. Will not require a specific vendor integration or business application platform
      11. Intermission
    14. Chapter 8: Best Practice 1: Deliver Faster
      1. Reducing Wait Time through Virtual Privacy
      2. Kill Stubs Now, or Pay Later
      3. Sprint: Putting Shift-Left in Practice
    15. Chapter 9: Best Practice 2: Reduce Your Infrastructure Footprint
      1. Finding Over-Utilized Resources
      2. Mainframe Development Needs Virtualization Too
      3. Avoiding Big IT Outlays
      4. Customer Example: Dodging a Wave
    16. Chapter 10: Best Practice 3: Transform Performance and Scale
      1. Virtualizing Performance Environments: Are You Waiting to Fail?
      2. Component-Level Performance Budgeting
      3. Informing Performance from Production
      4. Performance Testing by Design
    17. Chapter 11: Best Practice 4: Data Scenario Management
      1. vTDM: Just the Data You Need
      2. Eliminate Conflicts over Data
      3. Data Masking: Trust, but Virtualize
      4. Expected Results
    18. Chapter 12: Rolling Out Service Virtualization
      1. The Stakes for Service Virtualization are Huge, So Don’t Settle
      2. But what about the risk? Won’t this create upheaval in my organization?
      3. Changes to the Software Development Lifecycle Process (SDLC)
      4. Build New Skills and Roles in a Virtual IT World
      5. Good Help Is Virtually Always in Demand
      6. Should We Centralize or Federate?
      7. Cool Alternative Use: Virtual Training Environments?
    19. Chapter 13: Service Virtualization and DevTest Cloud
      1. Constraints of Cloud Dev and Test
      2. Achieving High-Performance Cloud Environments
      3. Massively Parallel Regression Testing in Cloud
    20. Chapter 14: Assessing the Value
      1. Faster: The Value of Time-to-Market
      2. Measuring Results: Faster
      3. Indirect Value: Moving Faster
      4. Better: The Value of Quality
      5. Results: Better Quality
      6. Indirect Value: Better
      7. Cheaper: The Value of Cost Savings
      8. Results: Cheaper (Lower Costs)
      9. Organizational Roadmap: Planning to Continually Improve
    21. Chapter 15: Conclusion
      1. The Industrialized Software Supply Chain
      2. Innovate and Thrive in Good Times and Bad
      3. Prepare to Revisit Your Enterprise Release Strategy
    22. Afterword: Virtual Confession
    23. Glossary
      1. The journey toward Service Virtualization doesn’t stop here.
    24. Index

    Product information

    • Title: Service Virtualization: Reality Is Overrated
    • Author(s): John Michelsen, Jason English
    • Release date: September 2012
    • Publisher(s): Apress
    • ISBN: 9781430246718