Reducing the time from idea to market is a key driver for the Agile and DevOps movements. Frequent releases mean faster customer feedback and an increased ability to adjust your trajectory towards success.

The reality for a lot of organisations, however, is that they are constrained in their speed of delivery by complex and heavy integrations within their environments. This is where Service Virtualization can help.

Enabling integration

Service Virtualization helps you to replicate systems, services or components of your environment that are unavailable, under construction or expensive to access. Essentially, you can replicate as little or as much of your environment as you need, making it easier and cheaper to spin up integrated environments. This allows your delivery team to focus on the components under development without the constraints around availability of its integrations and increase the speed of delivery.

This same message has been touted about Service Virtualization for the last few years, yet in last year’s Planit Index we saw only 19 per cent of organisations consider it a vital component of their systems development life cycle (SDLC). For many, the concepts around Service Virtualization are quite abstract and the direct business value is not always obvious.

Here are some practical examples of how Planit has helped a couple of clients benefit from Service Virtualization:

Case 1 – Enabler for Performance

A charity was looking to determine the capacity of their donations page that processed payments using a third-party gateway. However, this third-party system did not support performance testing.

Planit utilised their cloud-based Service Virtualization offering to replicate the payment gateway, and cloud-based Performance Testing to inject the load. The charity repointed their application to the virtual payment gateway and successfully completed their performance testing.

Case 2 – Delivery Accelerator

A government department was developing a number of highly integrated applications. Despite months of development, the first time any real issues were discovered was when they finally deployed into an integrated environment.

Planit implemented a number of virtual services to accelerate development and testing, which resulted in projects being delivered between 6-8 weeks earlier than before. This time saving significantly increased the number of releases per year that could be supported, accelerating the delivery of key functionality.

Case 3 – Testing Accelerator

An airline was looking to improve the efficiency of their current testing practice for an application that relied heavily on a backend web service. A majority of the testing time was spent preparing data on the backend service to enable their test scenarios, some of which interfered with other test activities.

Planit implemented a data driven virtual service replicating the web service, which brought the test preparation time down significantly. It also allowed multiple teams to test the application at the same time without any conflicts or reliance on the backend service.

Overcome limitations

These are just a few examples of how Planit utilised Service Virtualization to realise real benefits. Next time you are stuck with environment constraints, third-party limitations or looking to increase the effectiveness of your application development and testing, Service Virtualization might be the answer.

To find out how Planit can help you realise similar benefits, visit our Service Virtualization page.