Key benefits

Benefits of Service Virtualization

Service Virtualization is being used today by organizations to:

Reduce overheads by up to 50%
Accelerate testing by up to 50%
Accelerate IT change delivery by up to 50%

Keep Working instead of Waiting

Simulating the behavior and data of an unavailable or incomplete resource can reduce the Feature cycle time and the Feature lead time. For example, if a Feature is idle in an implementation/testing queue due to a dependency on an incomplete or missing application, virtualizing the application will eliminate waiting for the application to be available or completed.

Organizational Benefits from Service Virtualization

The benefits of Service Virtualization can be realized at several levels of an organization. The benefits may also drive how the practice is adopted. These are typically the drivers that determine the investment, the return on investment (ROI) and the time to realize the ROI and complete the adoption. The chart below shows how benefits are realized by different domains and industries.

Automated integration testing. A centralized virtual service capability is used to model a system under test (SUT) and capture / create test requirements in the form of test input messages and expected results in the required SUT message formats and protocols. These are grouped into test suites which are used to automate testing of development code-drops and system releases.
Test execution time is measured in minutes or hours as compared to previous manual testing typically measured in days
Defect detection is increased as integration tests check below the user interface level to check that system internal functions execute correctly
Service virtualization (component simulation). The centralized virtual service capability is used to simulate one or more applications / components to reduce program / project critical path dependencies on elements not yet developed or that are unavailable due to time or other constraints.
Integration testing occurs earlier enabling early detection and resolution of defects
Program / project slippage is mitigated resulting in earlier system go-live. In some cases this also results in the reduction or elimination of infrastructure and/or service provision fees.

Enterprise or organizational level

At the enterprise level, the benefits associated with adopting virtualized services practices for adoption scenarios that include providing a centralized capability for reusable virtual services include:

Reduced time to market. This approach reduced the overhead individual releases, projects, teams and developers must do to perform early testing. This effort is reduced to a single team who creates and updates the service once for everyone.
Costs: In the enterprise model, costly third party or complex services used by many teams can be replaced by a centralized capability that is developed and managed one time.
Agility. Deployment of virtualized services practices across the enterprise will provide a means for agile teams to quickly testing their changes during iterations and mitigate dependencies without incurring additional overhead.

Program or Department Level

Programs or departments realize benefits by avoiding complicated test scheduling of interdependent components during development and integration testing.

Critical path reduction / risk mitigation. Programs or departments mitigate the dependencies between interdependent applications or application components by replacing them with virtual services in early test environments. They avoid the risk of delayed testing, high test backlogs or increased late cycle defects if sufficient testing is not performed. and in some cases early.

Project or team level

Smaller teams realize less overhead to perform early and continuous testing through virtualized services.

Efficiency. Centralized virtual services provide a means for individual teams to automate the creation and sharing of virtual services. Reuse across teams and project members reduce the costs to create the services and provides for a continuous improvement process through recording or versioning. Any centralized capability for developing services also reduces the resource costs for the team.
Coverage. Virtual services ensure a complete coverage of interaction is available to ensure a more complete testing process can be used during development and integration testing and mature applications before QA.

Implementation Example - Improved ROI

A major European bank implemented service virtualization and automated integration testing as part of an Agile transformation to enable continuous testing. As a result of IBM capabilities, their system integration test (SIT) process was reduced from 3 weeks down to four hours!

3 Year Benefits:

Increased project delivery capacity 100% (40 projects to 80 projects)
Avoided hiring three additional FTE's, saving almost $600k.
Reduced incidents found in production from 2.5 to .3 per project, saving $3 million
Identified defects earlier and freed the team up to focus on new capabilities, saving over $560k
Reduced consulting and third party testing fees with better test automation, saving $408k
Eliminated the need for additional hardware and labor to set up test environments, saving $700k
Generated new revenue for the business – estimated at tens of millions!