Digital transformation is a crucial driver of innovation in today’s organizations. Without it, firms risk quickly and inevitably losing their competitive edge. To succeed with digital transformation, business leaders must incorporate critical elements like automation, security, business continuity, and agility into their strategic initiatives. These elements position firms to keep up with rapid change in their products and services—with more resilience and less exposure to risk and potential setbacks.

At the heart of digital transformation in today’s software-driven markets is service virtualization, a powerful catalyst for streamlining operations, increasing productivity, reducing testing and maintenance costs, and ultimately delivering higher-quality software to market as quickly as possible. Service virtualization supercharges development efforts by allowing teams to overcome bottlenecks, reduce dependency on physical systems, and embrace faster innovation cycles while mitigating risks.

In this article, you’ll learn how service virtualization enables faster, risk-free innovation and how Service Virtualization by Broadcom—a longstanding leader in this field—supports organizations in accelerating their digital transformation journeys by implementing more effective service virtualization processes across their operations.

What Is Service Virtualization?

As its name implies, service virtualization involves the virtualization and simulation of required systems and services throughout a software’s development lifecycle. Crucially, it allows for development and testing to proceed even when systems or third-party resources are unavailable or too expensive to implement. 

These systems or resources might include software applications, microservices, APIs, or even complex backend systems and infrastructure components (e.g., mainframes, ERP systems, industrial control systems). In all cases, service virtualization aims to remove constraints by reliably emulating required ecosystem components.

Key Benefits of Service Virtualization for Modern Software Development

From reducing costs to improving efficiency, the following are some key benefits that service virtualization brings to modern software development teams.

Accelerated Development Cycles

Service virtualization enables more effective parallel development and testing, significantly reducing time-to-market. By simulating required systems, it removes constraints throughout the software development lifecycle that can hinder continuous testing and concurrent development.

By emulating specific components within complex, component-based applications, service virtualization allows developers to work in self-contained environments that closely mirror production. This approach supports both isolated and simultaneous development and testing activities, allowing developers, testers, and performance teams to work in parallel. The result is faster delivery, lower costs, and improved quality for innovative software applications.

Increased Cost Savings

Service virtualization empowers development teams to create virtual environments, reducing the need for costly third-party services and infrastructure investments. By emulating core applications, external services, and even entire backend systems, teams can seamlessly share virtual assets and collaborate more effectively. 

This removal of dependency constraints enables organizations to accelerate development cycles and maintain a cost advantage over competitors still relying on traditional development methods.

Enhanced Testing Capabilities

APIs, microservices, mainframes, and third-party systems are often unavailable for testing until late in the development cycle. Consequently, organizations struggle to test application components that reside outside their development environment, as these resources are frequently inaccessible when testers need them.

Service virtualization enables shift-left testing, a practice that moves testing and validation earlier in the software lifecycle. Rather than waiting for complex or isolated systems to become available or cost-effective to integrate, teams can use service virtualization to carry out testing earlier in the software development process, resulting in fewer bugs and reduced overall project risk.

Improved Performance Readiness

Service virtualization frees testers from relying on production assets that may be unavailable, which in turn enables continuous integrated testing throughout the software development lifecycle. This approach allows for more comprehensive performance and functional testing to be conducted in parallel.

By simulating production-level conditions, service virtualization empowers teams across the development and delivery ecosystem to perform robust performance testing, reducing risk and saving both time and effort. Performance tests can be executed against simulations of APIs, complex environments, mainframes, and third-party services.

Driving Agility and Resilience with Broadcom Service Virtualization

Broadcom Service Virtualization is a leading solution that enables teams to create virtual versions of services, APIs, and systems, allowing testing to proceed even when these components are unavailable or costly to access. It provides the following key features for effective service virtualization:

Service and Application Emulation

Broadcom Service Virtualization offers service and application emulation capabilities for a wide range of front-end, middleware, and backend systems, supporting protocols for popular APIs (e.g., REST, SOAP, XML, JSON), middleware (e.g., WebSphere MQ, WebSphere Native, Standard JMS, Tibco JMS, Rabbit MQ), mainframes (CICS Link, CICS Transaction Gateway or CTG, IMS Connect, DRDA, Copybook), ERP systems (e.g., SAP: RFC/Jco, Idoc/Jco), databases (JDBC), and financial systems (SWIFT, EDI/X12).

Integrations with Popular Developer Tools 

Broadcom Service Virtualization integrates with popular development tools, such as Selenium and Eclipse, and leading DevOps and CI/CD solutions like Jenkins and Docker. It also incorporates Broadcom Test Data Manager (TDM) natively, allowing developers and testers to quickly provision high-quality, fit-for-purpose test data.

Broadcom Service Virtualization in Practice: Real-World Use Cases

Organizations across various sectors rely on Broadcom Service Virtualization to streamline their development and testing processes. Here are two real-world examples from the banking/finance and telecommunications industries.

Banking and Finance

Westpac Banking Corporation, commonly known as Westpac, is an Australian multinational banking and financial services company. As Australia’s first and oldest bank and one of the country’s Big Four, Westpac serves 13 million customers globally and employs around 36,000 people. In 2022, it ranked 53rd in the “Top 1000 World Banks.”

Westpac uses Broadcom Service Virtualization over SOAPUI as its preferred tool, benefiting from its advanced protocol support and other key features.

Telecommunications

Telefónica Chile, a subsidiary of the Telefónica Group, offers a range of services, including landline and mobile telephony, internet, data access, pay TV, and IT solutions for businesses under the Movistar brand.

The company selected Broadcom Service Virtualization to streamline its application development and testing processes while optimizing costs and improving the software development lifecycle. As a result, Telefónica Chile reduced infrastructure testing costs by 20% and accelerated its Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) practices, achieving a 15% reduction in time-to-market for applications.

Overcoming Common Development Challenges with Broadcom Service Virtualization

Modern software development often faces delays and constraints due to limited access to essential systems and resources. Broadcom Service Virtualization addresses these challenges by providing solutions that streamline testing and accelerate the development process. 

Key challenges it helps overcome include:

Elimination of Bottlenecks

Broadcom Service Virtualization allows testing teams to access otherwise constrained or incomplete components in their testing environment, which would typically slow down development and testing. By creating virtual versions of these dependencies and simulating their functionality, Broadcom Service Virtualization eliminates bottlenecks, providing quick and easy access to incomplete systems, third-party-controlled systems, restricted systems, and systems needed by multiple parties simultaneously.

Reducing Infrastructure Constraints

Comprehensive testing often requires extensive hardware and software resources to cover a wide range of scenarios. Broadcom Service Virtualization simulates the behavior of various systems without needing the actual hardware or software. By emulating constrained or unavailable systems, teams can conduct faster, parallel testing, resulting in higher application quality and reliability.

Simulating Third-Party Systems

In software development, it’s common to use stubs and mocks in API testing. Stubs simulate simple interactions to retrieve response data, while mocks emulate more complex scenarios to verify API interactions. However, these methods can result in fragile connections and unreliable test outcomes. 

Broadcom Service Virtualization provides a more comprehensive mirror of production API specifications, enabling high-fidelity testing at any layer and reducing the risk of failure when applications are deployed in production.

Future-Proofing Digital Transformation Initiatives with Broadcom Service Virtualization

As software architectures become more complex and diverse, with application development and underlying IT infrastructures moving to the cloud, service virtualization becomes essential to an organization’s digital transformation strategy. It enables firms to support DevOps, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud-native development by streamlining development and testing cycles.

In DevOps environments, service virtualization allows teams to simulate and test complex systems and dependencies early in the development process. Within CI/CD pipelines, it enhances automated testing by enabling parallel testing, quicker issue detection, and faster deployment. For teams developing cloud-native applications with microservices, service virtualization allows for emulation of third-party services and APIs, facilitating testing across distributed environments without the need for live systems. This results in reduced risk, improved software quality, and faster time-to-market.

As a key driver of digital transformation, service virtualization helps organizations eliminate bottlenecks, reduce dependency on physical systems, and accelerate innovation. Service Virtualization by Broadcom is a leading solution, empowering teams to enhance agility and resilience. To learn more, book a demo or speak with an A&I team member today.