Part 1. First Steps

Welcome, friend.

Those words adorn the welcome mat near my front door, and they are the first words you will see when you visit the mountebank website (https://www.mbtest.org). I’d very much like them to be the first words you read in this book, as I welcome you to the wonderful world of service virtualization in general and mountebank in particular.

This first part aims to provide context behind that introduction, setting the stage for introducing mountebank as part of your testing and continuous delivery stack. Because one of the main drivers behind service virtualization is the increasingly distributed nature of computing, chapter 1 starts with a brief review of microservices, with a focus on how they change the way we test software. It puts service virtualization in context and provides a gentle introduction to the main components of mountebank.

Chapter 2 demonstrates mountebank in action. You’ll get some dirt under your nails as you write your first test using service virtualization, providing a simple launching point to explore the full capabilities of mountebank in part 2.