1. An introduction to service virtualization and its benefits to the software development and testing process
2. Knowledge on how to combine service virtualization with containers and cloud services for on-demand test environment creation
3. Knowledge on how to leverage these on-demand environments in the testing and continuous integration and delivery process

Rix Groenboom is manager solution architects for Parasoft in the EMEA, mainly in the area of testing and virtualization of modern SOA, SaaS and cloud-based architectures. He has written a large number of technical articles and presented on many IT industry conferences. His core area of expertise is specification, design and validation of software applications. He holds an MSc and PhD in Computing Science and published a thesis focusing on the formalization of domain knowledge. Besides this, he is industrial advisor for Department of Computing Science of the University in Groningen, in which role he supervises a number of applied research projects in the field of automated testing, cloud and SaaS.

With continuous integration and continuous delivery firmly establishing themselves in the software development and delivery world, early and fast testing has become mission-critical for a lot of organizations wanting to keep up with the competition. However, time and again test execution is blocked by application dependencies being unavailable, not having the right amount of test data or otherwise being access-restricted.

Service virtualization is an approach that can be used to create, deploy and exercise virtual assets that your test team has full control over. For example, with service virtualization you can easily:

* Add exactly the right test data for the test cases to be executed to your simulated dependencies;
* Simulate functional and non-functional edge and error cases that might be very hard (or even impossible) to recreate in a real dependency;
* Alter the performance characteristics of your virtual assets to simulate peak loads, network outages and intermittent failures.

By combining service virtualization with container management platforms such as Docker, development teams can create, share, use and destroy test environments on-demand, in seconds. This means that the provisioning and configuration of these test environments can be integrated into existing continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines, enabling teams to regain full control over their test environments and the testing process.

In our presentation, we will walk the attendants through the prerequisites and the setup of this integrated test environment deployment approach and show them how software development teams can benefit from these on-demand virtual test environments.