Deadlocks are endemic to parallel and Agile development environments, where different teams are simultaneously working on interconnected system componentsâ€”and each team needs to access the others’ components in order to complete its own tasks. But when a team ends up waiting for access to dependent functionality, agility is stifled.
Parasoft Virtualize helps teams break free from these deadlocks. By providing a definition file or using the graphical interface, you can rapidly create a virtual asset that represents the specific behavior which needs to be accessed during development and testing tasks. Leveraging the broad scope of protocol support available to facilitate modeling, you can rapidly build a virtual asset that emulates practically any anticipated behavior. For instance, you can visually model various message formats such as XML, JSON, and various legacy, financial, healthcare, and other domain-specific formats. No scripting is required (although scripting is fully supported).
Rapid response to constantly-evolving requirements lies at the heart of Agile development initiatives, so it’s essential that any virtual asset constructed be extremely flexible and easy to change. For example, a virtual asset created from a WSDL might need to accommodate additional operations. Virtualized database behavior might need to provide additional fields of data. Or, a system might be migrating to a more secure implementation, so its virtualized messages might need to evolve accordingly. Whatever the change, it can be rapidly applied to the virtual asset through Parasoft Virtualize’s intuitive interface.
The teams working on today’s distributed heterogeneous systems are typically quite distributed and heterogeneous themselves. This means that a virtual asset standing in for a not-yet-available component might need to be accessed by a wide range of team membersâ€”including developers, testers, and sometimes business analystsâ€”-and these team members are often dispersed across the company and situated in different geographical locations. Parasoft enables even non-technical users to deploy the virtual assets for secure team-wide access, then update them with one click to reflect any changes in the asset’s anticipated behavior. This way, teams can rapidly deploy and evolve virtual assets on demand.
Agile/parallel development teams sometimes try to work around the above challenges by developing stubs or mocks. Unlike stubs or mocks, Parasoft Virtualize’s virtual assets are simple to create, represent a broad range of realistic behavior, and are easy to update as the components evolve. While stubs are created from the perspective of the test suite in order to “skip” unavailable system components, virtual assets are constructed to make the behavior of constrained components available to the entire team. With the virtual asset centrally provisioned, all team members access the same asset, which is expressing the expected behavior. This allows absolute consistency and reduced risk of defects slipping into the final product.