80/20 service virtualization

How do we create virtual services for all of our test environments?

I have been asked this question recently by a managing director at a large test consultancy based in the UK. They work with financial institutions that use old test infrastructure that need service virtualization because of the typical problems like third party transaction costs, scheduling time on old mainframe environments and test data setup issues.

When we unpack that question, we realise that the short answer is, in most cases, you don’t to start with virtualizing everything. Instead, you focus on the low hanging fruit, start delivering value to testing teams and later scale from there.

80/20 rule in service virtualization

Try to apply the Pareto principle in service virtualization as often as possible. You could interpret it as “80% of value delivered by using service virtualization comes from 20% of virtual services”. Some managers also say that they would “invest time in picking the low hanging fruit first”.

An example of applying that mindset would be to find easy to virtualize APIs that are causing a lot of problems for the testing teams, virtualize them and let the test teams use those assets. Once that has been done, look for the next most important APIs to virtualize and repeat the cycle again.