Broadcom Service Virtualization Reviews

For us, the most valuable feature is that it gives us the ability to virtualize a lot of our integrated systems. That’s valuable because we have difficulty trying to coordinate all those different systems in terms of scheduling, timing, refreshing of data, and that type of things. It gives the developers freedom to develop without needing to wait for others; so it eliminates bottlenecks for us.

We were having a lot of bottlenecks in our development process. Developers were waiting around for somebody else to finish and that helped alleviate that.

I don't think we've gotten enough experience with this version to talk about what should be in the next version.

It could be easier to setup and to deploy.

We have just started with the product. We're probably about six months in.

We haven’t noticed any stability issues.

Technical support was responsive. They did a good job.

The initial setup was straightforward. It required training, but it was straightforward after the training. The training helped get us off the ground.

We did not have a solution before. We went with CA Service Virtualization because of their ability to have a long-term customer relationship, and the ability to work with us to get the product off the ground.

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.

Using the agile method, each iteration is scheduled to last 1-2 weeks and development would take up most of that. The testers didn't have enough time to properly test the application. With Service Virtualization, we virtualized the services and we brought quality into the agile iteration “extreme left”, and we started early testing.

That's how we got enough time to test the product. Service Virtualization helped us by using marks and stops. We are easily integrating with other applications and we are performing integration testing seamlessly. Before implementing Service Virtualization, services were not always available because of infrastructure issues or iteration time schedules. Service Virtualization removed all these problems that we were facing in the industry and allowed us to quickly do our job.

We not only use Service Virtualization for web services, we also use it to virtualize services that we used to pay for. It can be used in the enterprise bus to integrate external applications. In the QA domain, you need to pay a lot to use their services. Service Virtualization can save you this money.

For example, I have previous experience with the financial and insurance industries. In the financial sector, we integrate with third-party credit agencies to check credit scores. You still need to pay for these services even when you are only testing your application. If you virtualize that functionality, you don't need to talk to them, and you don't need to be dependent on their system availability.

We still have mainframe systems and while CA provides instructions on how to integrate Linux-based applications, they don’t provide integration steps for mainframe.

We would like to see improvements in mobile integration. Integration is partial, but we would like to have full-fledged functionality. Android mobile solutions are out there, so you can download an app and have full-fledged mobile coverage. You can set the model and Android operating system. But we can’t integrate these with development testing. If we get that feature, we don't need to look at other products like HPE Mobile Center, or something else. Having mobile would be good for us.

We are also looking for more knowledge to share with our developers, and others, on how to use Selenium scripts within CA Service Virtualization. The process is pretty simple. You build everything in Selenium, convert the script to JSON, and dump it to Service Virtualization; alternatively, copy the script and put it in CA Service Virtualization steps. But these guidelines are not clear enough. Clarifying this process would definitely be a benefit for CA.

Service Virtualization is pretty stable.

We are in the financial industry and process a large number of transactions. Every second, we process around 78,000 transactions; every second counts. Sometimes, especially when the servers are down, our message queues will accumulate hundreds of thousands of messages. When the issue is resolved and the gates are open, all those messages will flood the system. We tested all these things with CA Performance Testing. In real time, we cannot test using Service Virtualization, but we built all the messages, and the message queues, and we tested by opening the gates. We found that scalability is also pretty good.

Calling technical support works out good. But the website search function could be improved a lot. Their knowledge management system is not up to the mark. The search functionality really needs to be improved. CA has to really spend some time looking into that. Depending on the search, the content can be very limited. I would like to see examples and links to the documentation. The current search function is not detailed enough.

I'm a systems architect. I had a lot of experience with the development infrastructure architecture. I see that there are problems in all production areas. I always do research on the latest and greatest products. CA is one of the companies I've been following for almost 15 years. I discovered Service Virtualization when I learned that CA acquired ITKO.

I was involved in the initial setup at a different client. It was pretty straightforward, I never faced any issues, and in fact I purchased myself a license from CA, spending a lot of money on this. I was a good investment for me. I'm very passionate about technology. I have bought a lot of software, but it is worthwhile spending money on this.

We also use HPE for testing right now, particularly Mobile Center. Not every product will address 100% of the issues.

However, CA Service Virtualization is totally number one in the market, no one comes close to this. HPE introduced a product recently, but they're nowhere close. They need to spend a lot of time on that product.

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.

It provides us a high level of integration with all of our solutions, to the extent that we can set up modules with Service Virtualization functionality at the same time. We will do more with it once we get more into it. So far, we have been using it mainly for services.

It's allows us to work more globally across all our teams. Since the tool integrates with our services, we can do more.

I spoke to them at a recent conference and I think they're going to be looking at doing some more JUnit integration to be able to convert JUnit into their solutions. We're still using an older version so, hopefully upgrading to a newer version will enhance some of the features that are already out there that we don't have.

Stability is getting better. When we first started with it, there were some bugs. We had some issues between our environment and the tool.

It seems to be that we'll be able to scale it, as we get more into this tool and other CA tools. It seems like we're able to build one top of the other.

We used technical support quite a bit for different issues that popped up when we first started using the tool or tried to use new features. We’ve received great service. We’ve been working with some senior engineers and they've been taking our input. Hopefully, we'll be able to start working with them a little bit more when they do their baselines for new features.

We were using SoapUI and we were looking for a higher level of integration.

Initial setup was both straightforward and complex. We had some configuration issues, such as conflicts with our firewall. They helped with what they were able to help with. For some of the issues, we needed our security desk and network teams to open up ports and other things like that.

We brought on some new senior management directors and looked at different tools. We evaluated a number of different API testing tools. I don't know them all. Choosing CA was a management decision. I think my new manager had used or seen the tool in the past.

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.

The most valuable feature is the ability to create systems. We use TIBCO for our integration; the ability to create those systems when they are not available to us is very effective.

It has helped our organization in term of its availability and being able to create systems immediately. This happens in cases when our developers are held up or when we have to spend a lot of time switching between development and testing; that can really slow us down. This causes problems sometimes when we forget to disconnect and reconnect.

I would like to see improvements in the naming conventions. The current naming conventions of CA Service Virtualization are hard to use.

 I haven't seen any problems with stability. It looks pretty stable.

In terms of scalability, we're just getting started so we're just going through examples. CA is on site and they are taking us through the process. We haven't really gotten into the scale end too much. We are just taking small chunks and proving the concept.

CA came in and installed it. It seemed like it was a straightforward installation as long as you know what you're doing. I couldn't just do it out-of-the-box, but it seemed like it was pretty straightforward.

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.

For service virtualization, you can have continuous testing and development without interruption to your test cycle. For dev test, I been able to customize to being able to test, automate batch testing, and integrate that with my API testing and UI testing. I have been able to use that as an integrator. I have had no issues with integration. We have been able to use custom code to integrate the pieces so we really haven't had too many problems with it.

It's giving us a base start to add some customer framework so that we all behave in the same manner. For example, we've integrated it with Jenkins. We started to use the invoke XML results to integrate with other services to show us results. We can do that in Jenkins or we can do that with some custom visibility tools that we're building.

See below.

In terms of stability, I have to restart it every day. We set it on job and we just restart it every day. Otherwise, it seems to go down.

My team uses technical support. We have had problems with the upgrades. This is because we are on a Linux server and not on Windows. Those upgrades don't tend to go smoothly. We usually just involve somebody from the tech team right away, and just have them go through the upgrade with us. They are very supportive. They're at least a part of the experience. Unfortunately, it hasn't stopped us from running into problems, but at least we have somebody there to deal with the problems for the upgrade. We had to slog through our last upgrade, and we lost our database. We lost our history, which was pretty annoying.

I was involved in the initial setup of the service virtualization. We stood up our own Linux server. The setup was pretty out of the box. It wasn’t difficult. Our developers, though, want it to be easier. They don't like to use it. they want it to be easy to set up.

I would like to see some kind of dashboard that shows all of the dev test scripts that we have out there so that that we don’t have to rewrite the same ones across the enterprise. We can look to see what's there and reuse some of the ones that are there. Right now, it's hard to figure out what we have.

I would like to have some way to enable developers to use it more. They tend to like to go to JMeter before they do a dev test. The developers don’t need the UI and all the overhead that goes along with that. They already understand how to virtualize. I think it's a great tool, but it seems a little thick and heavy and it's very expensive. I think we are able to find open source solutions that do similar things. What I have found that I like is that I can use it to do my out-of-the-box things, like my batch testing and integrate some of my other tests and inflow that I don't get from other tools.

Give it a try.

The biggest value for us was writing all the stories and figuring out what stories are going to get into which sprint. It also helps us with organizing the backlog and dependencies. We've found those features to be useful to us.

In terms of improving the way the organization functions, it gives us lot of visibility into what features are getting released when. It also helps us track across the organization in a much better fashion. I think visibility is the biggest benefit that we got out of implementing CA Service Virtualization.

We would like to see more robust dependency management. This is the only thing that comes to my mind.

We have not had any issues with stability. I think things have been working fine for us so far.

We've started a little slow. There are just a couple of teams that are using CA Service Virtualization, so we have not really scaled it up for multiple teams across the organization. But within our group, there are like 3 or 4 teams that are using it right now.

We have not used technical support so far. Thankfully, we didn't have to use them.

We did not have any previous solutions, but our organization was moving towards this. We evaluated a few products and CA seemed to be a good option that will fit all of our needs.

I was not involved in the initial setup, but there was somebody in my team that was involved. I don't think we encountered a lot of issues or challenges as such. We had to, of course, pull some experts from CA as well just to get their ideas on how we're supposed to set up, how things work, and what are best practices. Other than that, the first couple of sprints we had to learn and tweak a little bit as part of our retrospectives. Otherwise it's been pretty much okay.

We had Pivotal Tracker and probably a couple of other vendors as well. I don't remember their names. We went with CA Service Virtualization due to the user interface. We found it to be more intuitive than the others. We felt that it can probably scale up to the needs of what we have within the organization in terms of integrating with the rest of the ecosystem.

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.

The solution helps us develop applications faster.

We get things done better and faster. I think everybody benefits from that.

We need to get more and more types of services because this is a multidisciplinary platform. CA can develop more services in it.

Stability is good.

We haven't upgraded to any new versions, so we have been using the same platform. I don't really have an opinion about that yet.

We don’t use technical support. We use local providers.

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 like the fact that it allows us to focus on just the system under test. We can remove of all the dependent requirements from the system.

It allows us to implement an Agile Shift Left development paradigm so that we can start testing things before all the pieces of are completed.

I think the biggest improvement can come in usability. It's still very complex to use. Also, we've found a fair number of bugs, but CA always resolves them.

I would say it's been mostly stable. We did have a problem related to a service one of our teams was running that was not working properly. But, we don’t yet know what the root cause was.

It's scaled to meet all of our needs so far.

Technical support has been good. They're responsive to our requests.

All our teams were using their own solutions. We wanted something more universal.

Initial setup was straight forward. It was an easy install.

We also looked at Parasoft, but we thought that CA met our vendor requirements more closely.

When choosing a vendor, the most important criteria is whether we can have a long-term partnership with them. Obviously, cost is also an important factor, as well as software reliability. We also look at the future road map for the product.

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.