Service Virtualization: Reality Is Overrated

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. Service Virtualization is a method to emulate the behavior of  components in heterogeneous applications such as "Service-Oriented Architectures" (SOA). 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 learnYou 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 ContentsForeword by Burt Klein

Chapter 1. Introduction

Chapter 2. The Business Imperative: Innovate or Die

Chapter 3. How We Got Here

Chapter 4. Constraints: The Enemy of Agility

Chapter 5. What is Service Virtualization?

Chapter 6. Where to Start with SV?

Chapter 7. Capabilities of Service Virtualization Technology

Chapter 8. Best Practice #1: Shift-Left

Chapter 9. Best Practice #2: Infrastructure Availability

Chapter 10. Best Practice #3: Performance Readiness

Chapter 11. Best Practice #4: Test Scenario Management

Chapter 12. Rolling out Service Virtualization

Chapter 13. Service Virtualization in the DevTest Cloud

Chapter 14. Assessing the Value

Chapter 15. Conclusion

Glossary

About the Authors