A Review on the Service Virtualisation and Its Structural Pillars

Continuous delivery is an industry software development approach that aims to reduce the delivery time of software and increase the quality assurance within a short development cycle. The fast delivery and improved quality require continuous testing of the developed software service. Testing services are complicated and costly and postponed to the end of development due to unavailability of the requisite services. Therefore, an empirical approach that has been utilised to overcome these challenges is to automate software testing by virtualising the requisite services’ behaviour for the system being tested. Service virtualisation involves analysing the behaviour of software services to uncover their external behaviour in order to generate a light-weight executable model of the requisite services. There are different research areas which can be used to create such a virtual model of services from network interactions or service execution logs, including message format extraction, inferring control model, data model and multi-service dependencies. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art of how these areas have been used in automating the service virtualisation to make available the required environment for testing software. This paper provides a review of the relevant research within these four fields by carrying out a structured study on about 80 research works. These studies were then categorised according to their functional context as, extracting the message format, control model, data model and multi-service dependencies that can be employed to automate the service virtualisation activity. Based on our knowledge, this is the first structural review paper in service virtualisation fields.