Complex sentence: In software engineering, service virtualization is a method to emulate the behavior of specific components in heterogeneous component-based applications such as service-oriented architectures so that the real components are no longer needed for development and testing.
Split into simpler sentences: In software engineering, service virtualization is a method to emulate the behavior of specific components in heterogeneous component-based applications such as service-oriented architectures. With the behavior of the dependent components "virtualized," the real components are no longer needed for development and testing.