- Author: [[stackoverflow.com]] - Full Title: Stubs / Mocks vs. Service Virtualization..? Yikes - Tags:: [[articles]] - URL: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12055654/stubs-mocks-vs-service-virtualization-yikes - ### Highlights first synced by [[Readwise]] [[2020-09-05]] - Basically, stubs disconnect a test suite from an environment and service virtualization emulates an environment in order to better exercise the true intent of a test. - While stubs/mocks are typically used to “skip” unavailable system components, service virtualization allows team members to emulate environments (or specific components) and make their behavior available to the entire team. For instance, service virtualization might be used to emulate the behavior of a dependent component (such as a 3rd-party service, database, mainframe, packaged application, etc.) that is evolving, not yet available, or difficult to access / configure for testing. - `Service virtualization can represent much more realistic behavior than simple stubs and mocks. If you can access the dependent application, you can capture its current behavior in a "virtual asset" by recording from the live system. Alternatively, you can model virtual assets that represent the anticipated behavior. You can then configure this virtual asset by parameterizing its conditional behavior, performance criteria, and test data. Moreover, you can easily modify the virtual asset to produce the appropriate assortment of fault conditions, exceptions, etc. that should be exercised in order to validate the full range of system behavior. `