Video: Stubs & Mocks vs. Virtual Services

Reading this blog you know that we are convinced — and have plenty of evidence to prove that conviction — that Virtual Services have a transformational effect on your dev and testing capabilities. The whole concept of virtual services is to provide productized technology for the general science discipline of modeling and simulation.

Well many of you already build and maintain a form of that now: stubbing, mocking, a responder framework, echo server, dev harnesses… you call them all kinds of things.

Well then what's the difference?  How is the capacity CA LISA provides for virtual services any different than what your development team might already be doing with stubs or mocks?

 

 

The video here points right at the heart of that question.  For those who like to read the book and avoid the movie, stubs vs. virtual services is essentially simplistic behavior models versus intelligent ones.  Simplistic models can give you a false sense of productivity early in a dev cycle, but they set you up for significant integration issues, late defect discovery and troublesome scalability blind spots. Only early development sees some infrastructure issues answered by the use of stubs - but not the rest of your integration and test cycles.  Conversely, virtual services can carry you from design all the way thru delivery and help you solve those issues.

So I hope you watch the video for a more elaborate explanation and let me know what you think.

Comments

[Testing Guru]

First of all, let me say that I have never worked on a serious enterprise app in my life. I am just very bitter because I write software for free and nobody likes me.

That said, this seems like this is a product apt for a legacy world. Today with everyone writing web services and rest services or services using industry standards not ITKO standards - it is very easy to tools to create mock services (or maybe I should call them virtual services) using the service contract itself e.g. the WSDL. If you have a true SOA center of expertise or excellence or whatever people call these centers in their organization, then mock services can be easily managed not only using the contract (e.g. WSDL in case of web service) but also data if they were using canonical models.