Parasoft has unveiled Virtualize, the company's fourth-generation Application-Behavior Virtualization (ABV) technology designed to help developers and testers reduce the testing constraints associated with today's heterogeneous composite applications.

By capturing and emulating dependent system behavior, Parasoft says that this new tool can circumvent the need to wrestle with schedules to access (for example) banking mainframes, multi-national ERP systems, third-party information systems, or any system that is out of direct developer control.

Virtualize creates a Parasoft Virtualized Asset that emulates dependent system behavior — including control over performance parameters and data.

"Parasoft Virtualize lowers the cost to stage an 'extraordinarily realistic' development and test environment," said Wayne Ariola, VP of strategy for Parasoft Corporation. "Not only does Parasoft Virtualize eliminate the traditional constraints of developing and testing complex applications, it also assists developers when executing rich end-to-end test scenarios, which includes cloud, mobile applications, and service-oriented architectures."

Virtualize is used in conjunction with hardware/OS virtualization to provide developers and testers with the resources they need to execute their development and testing tasks. The product embraces parallel development challenges and environment management as follows:

Environment Management — Parasoft Virtualize manages interdependent system connections (including support for large third-party systems), facilitates rapid development, testing, and deployment, and reduces the overhead for configuration or infrastructure management.

Parallel Development — Parasoft Virtualize removes parallel development delays by giving teams the ability to rapidly emulate or model the needed behavior rather than having to wait for others to upgrade, configure, and manage the dependent systems.