The Impact of Virtualisation in Testing | Why Didn't You Test That?

00:00 - Introduction to guest John Power, CEO of Ostia Solutions.

01:22 - John Power on the concept of providing Service Virtualisation related to Mainframe and other systems.

03:30 - The issue of Service Virtualisation led Ostia into Sandboxing: back-office, timeliness of recordings and non-sequentiality of calls.

05:30 - Why sandboxes should be considered integral, rather than a regulatory afterthought.

06:28 - Historical perspective on Service Virtualisation.

07:30 - Rich Jordan on the challenges for test teams of having run a services virtualisation team at enterprise.

10:50 - Huw Price on the misapprehensions of service virtualisation that came in the wake of market saturation of software vendors through to the need for organisations to rethink its use.

14:50 - John Power on why projects fail to a greater or lesser extent.

17:52 - Learning from Master Data Management and re-versioning and request-response pairs.

20:00 - Autonomy and alignment in terms of DevOps: flow, feedback and experimentation and how service virtualisation enables this.

23:00 - How a raft of interpersonal skills including imagination and critical thinking from testers can be priceless in early stage challenging to plug gaps in requirements.

25:30 - Sandboxes work with a framework relying on functional end-points and business rules in Ostia’s lo-code configuration based approach to payloads.

27:00 - From third party providers to the Payment Service Directive 2 how does this impact connecting to banking production systems in UK and Ireland.

31:09 - Why did the larger financial institutions initially perform poorly in implementing sandboxes?

32:35 - How to aim for tighter specifications and up-front expected results and coverage.

34:50 - How does an organisation build out its sandbox understanding in terms of managing blast radiuses.

39:09 - How to test historical data and it’s limitations.

41:07 - Effort upfront.

43:25 - Outro

In this episode, our hosts are joined by John Power, CEO of Ostia Solutions, together, they discuss the impact of virtualisation in testing!

Is virtualisation given its rightful place in testing? When deployed in a loosely coupled system, speed and flow increase, whilst reducing technical debt. Team alignment and version handling is improved, setting the terrain for better software delivery.

Rich Jordan shares his insight with virtualisation; a proper sandbox is fully simulated, improving developer and tester experiences, while although standalone, it does not compromise security as it uses synthetic data.

John Power describes how Ostia initially offered a proxy, using request-response algorithms for recording and replaying without Mainframes in play. They then went to providing full simulation by example of the UK's Open Banking Model. This involved moving the technology from simply record and replay of data to actual data generation.

Our hosts share their experiences on leading virtualisation teams, but also on how best to implement Master Data Management using sandboxes in model-based testing to avoid accidental complexity in the system under test. In adopting such an approach, the starting point really is to understand the current confidence level in the interface you’re asking service virtualisation to replace.

In practice, simulating what currently exists in a system, through the framework bringing in functional endpoints and business rules informs the required APIs to the benefit of time, security and quality. But the challenge is for organisations to value sandboxes in adjusting the system design, rather than as a regulatory or end-of-year afterthought. Beyond creating reusable assets, you’ll ensure continuous updates to sandbox data and testing models.

This approach also gives oversight to which contracts and test environments are affected, alongside sandboxes. Though, this requires moving away from centralised management of APIs. In working towards a better architectural design of a system, where dependencies are isolated, we can learn from Conway’s Law.

It suggests a system mimics the organisation's communication, so it's best to improve communication across teams first. Virtualisation will then thrive at an organisational level. You’ll be reducing technical debt, risk, extra effort and in parallel developing mature teams to enable flow, feedback and experimentation in the system under test.