Bas Dijkstra

Businesses are increasingly adopting continuous delivery (CD) as a way to deliver high-quality software on demand—and to stay ahead of the competition.

But to successfully adopt CD you must be able to determine the quality of your software product at all times and at all stages in your development and delivery pipeline. And to do that, you need to be doing continuous testing. That's not easy to accomplish, but service virtualization can help you get there.

As with software development and testing, test automation is a craft. You need specialized skills and expertise to create, implement, and maintain effective test automation solutions. A successful team of test automation craftsmen complements your development and testing teams and is a key asset to any software development organization.

While many organizations are investing heavily in test automation, what's not always clear to hiring managers is the kind of person who's likely to be… Show more

As with software development and testing, test automation is a craft. You need specialized skills and expertise to create, implement, and maintain effective test automation solutions. A successful team of test automation craftsmen complements your development and testing teams and is a key asset to any software development organization.

While many organizations are investing heavily in test automation, what's not always clear to hiring managers is the kind of person who's likely to be successful as a test automation engineer, and the best ways to identify, hire, and retain those people.

Here are some useful tips from my experience, as well as some of the common misconceptions to avoid. Show less

Now that APIs are playing an ever more important role in software trends (such as mobile applications, the Internet of Things, etc.), proper automated testing of these APIs is becoming indispensable. There are many different tools out there that can assist you in writing these automated tests at the API level. I'm going to show you how to use one of the most popular open-source tools for this task: REST Assured.

For many software-producing organizations, test automation is—or is quickly becoming—a cornerstone of their software development processes. Development teams are increasingly relying on automated checks to ensure that software that needs to be delivered in ever shorter iterations conforms to a quality level that meets or exceeds business and customer expectations.

As they get more heavily involved in test automation, these organizations are starting to realize that the activity of… Show more

For many software-producing organizations, test automation is—or is quickly becoming—a cornerstone of their software development processes. Development teams are increasingly relying on automated checks to ensure that software that needs to be delivered in ever shorter iterations conforms to a quality level that meets or exceeds business and customer expectations.

As they get more heavily involved in test automation, these organizations are starting to realize that the activity of creating and executing automated checks is an investment that they should regard as a "first class citizen" software development project, and not something they just do on the side. Show less

Adopting service virtualization can allow organizations to achieve more effective software development and testing by removing traditional test environment bottlenecks. Integrating service virtualization within the continuous delivery pipeline using containerization helps teams reach the level of flexibility required by today's competitive markets.

There is a wide range of tools available on the market that help you in creating automated API tests. These tools fall roughly into any of these categories: Open source, commercial, and custom.

In this post, let's take a deeper dive into API-level test automation to show you how to realize this within your own projects. My tool of choice for this post: REST Assured, an open source Java-based Domain-Specific Language (DSL) that allows you to write powerful, readable, and maintainable… Show more

There is a wide range of tools available on the market that help you in creating automated API tests. These tools fall roughly into any of these categories: Open source, commercial, and custom.

In this post, let's take a deeper dive into API-level test automation to show you how to realize this within your own projects. My tool of choice for this post: REST Assured, an open source Java-based Domain-Specific Language (DSL) that allows you to write powerful, readable, and maintainable automated tests for your RESTful APIs. Show less

Modern IT applications are becoming more distributed, mobile applications integrate with back-end systems through standardized interfaces, Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled devices communicate with each other and third-party services, and IT service providers are exposing parts of their data and services through APIs in order to generate additional cash flow (a phenomenon known as the API economy.) ...

Despite the rise of modern component-based and distributed systems, such as those based on a microservices architecture, a lot of organizations are still heavily relying on legacy systems and environments for the support of their day-to-day business processes. Finance and government are two examples of industries where legacy systems, specifically mainframes, still play an important role in the overall IT environment. Cost considerations are often behind the decision not to replace these… Show more

Despite the rise of modern component-based and distributed systems, such as those based on a microservices architecture, a lot of organizations are still heavily relying on legacy systems and environments for the support of their day-to-day business processes. Finance and government are two examples of industries where legacy systems, specifically mainframes, still play an important role in the overall IT environment. Cost considerations are often behind the decision not to replace these systems: If it isn’t broken, there's no need to fix it, so money can be better spent elsewhere. Show less

Rapidly changing markets are forcing organizations that rely on software to design, develop, and release quality software at speed. Modern applications which consist of an increasingly large number of independent, interconnected components make the software development process more complicated.

Service virtualization is a means for development teams to regain control over the availability of suitable test environments for data and application simulation and, as a result, over their… Show more

Rapidly changing markets are forcing organizations that rely on software to design, develop, and release quality software at speed. Modern applications which consist of an increasingly large number of independent, interconnected components make the software development process more complicated.

Service virtualization is a means for development teams to regain control over the availability of suitable test environments for data and application simulation and, as a result, over their software development life cycle.

This is intended to help you inform yourself about service virtualization as a means of improving testing and software delivery processes as well as the current state of the field and the way service virtualization can add value with regards to current and upcoming IT trends. Show less

For organizations wanting to rapidly and continuously deliver high quality software to answer to an increasingly demanding and competitive market, approaches such as Continuous Delivery, containerization, and microservices have become important parts of their software delivery life cycle. When attempting to deliver high-quality software at the required speed, however, test environment and dependency management can become a labor-intensive task for development teams and organizations. One… Show more

For organizations wanting to rapidly and continuously deliver high quality software to answer to an increasingly demanding and competitive market, approaches such as Continuous Delivery, containerization, and microservices have become important parts of their software delivery life cycle. When attempting to deliver high-quality software at the required speed, however, test environment and dependency management can become a labor-intensive task for development teams and organizations. One solution to this challenge is the adoption of service virtualization, which is proving useful not just for managing legacy systems but also for empowering new techniques and architectures. Show less

One of the major challenges in software development is ensuring that all the software components needed to do integration and end-to-end testing are available in the test environment. Implementing service virtualization can remove environment setup as a blocking condition—and enable project teams to release better software, faster.