This week sees the release of Parasoft Virtualize, a new component of the company's ALM platform designed to provide development and performance testing teams with "concurrent 24/7 access" to dependent test resources. The new software works by virtualizing application behavior instead of an entire system and so in theory will streamline the deployment and management of virtualized assets — which can then be accessed with an automated or manual testing platform or environment (for example, HP Quality Center, IBM Rational Quality Management Suite, Oracle ATS, etc.) as well as Parasoft Test.

Parasoft's new concept is to virtualize unavailable or inaccessible resources by capturing transactions from live systems, analyzing transaction logs, or allowing users to model behavior within the Parasoft Virtualize interface. System behavior can then be captured from components across heterogeneous architectures (e.g., legacy systems, web/cloud applications, services, databases, and MQ Series transactions).

The company says that virtualized test assets can be parameterized for data-driven testing and tuned to simulate very specific conditions needed for effective system validation — for instance, conditional flows, error conditions, response times, and so on. Finally, the test asset can be provisioned so that internal (and external) teams can access the test artifacts as needed to streamline their quality tasks.

"Parasoft Virtualize delivers significant cost savings associated with both hardware and physical resource management," said Wayne Ariola, VP of strategy for Parasoft. "By eliminating testing constraints in today's complex component-based architectures, development and testing can execute quality tasks rapidly and effectively, compressing software release cycles."