End-to-end testing in the public domain
Rik Marselis
No company or person can live without IT-systems nowadays. And with the possibilities the Internet provides IT-systems are widely connected to one-another. Also people have become so dependent on IT-systems that there is hardly any tolerance for failures. And ay failure is immediately visible to the customer.
Here we see the challenge of today's IT-organizations. To cope with the many risks involved most organizations are aware of the need of testing.
But often testing is focused on components or systems. And even the most perfect system generates dissatisfied customersi if it is wrongly integrated in the business process.
Therefore more and more organizations become aware of the need for end-to-end testing to make sure the business process as a whole is properly supported by the IT-systems.
In the public domain (government, healthcare ectcetera) business processes go far beyond the scope of one organization. With the introduction of the electronic patient files (EPD) in the Netherlands, very complex chains of IT-sytems have resulted. The presenter was involved in organizing end-to-end tests for some of these chains. The problems of organizing the tests of course had various technical aspects. (for one thing try to get a test environment that represents the operational situation of various government, healthcare and even some commercial organizations all together in one working environment!!)
But at least as many challenges arise through the people issues and politics that come with these large inter-organizational projects (If a bug is found for example, who is authorized to decide where it has to be fixed, and who is going to pay for the fix).
Key to making a success of an end-to-end test is early involvement of the relevant stakeholders, as well as proper mandate for the end-to-end test director who should be authorized (based on a approved end-to-end-test-plan) to cut corners whenever necessary to reach the goal. But also we learned that proper testing in order test phases is key to a succesful end-to-end test. A common pitfall for end-to-end testing is that too many testcases are prepared. Our experience is that an average of 20 end-to-end cases is all it takes to cover the risks that specifically relate to the IT-systems supporting the business process.
In this presentation you will learn about the do's and don'ts of end-to-end-testing as we learned during the course of preparing and executing these tests. And we will briefly go into the TMap-based end-to-end-testing theory we used as a basis for our work.
Who should attend?
Test Coordinators, Test managers and Testers wanting to evolve towards more planning and organisation.
Project Managers and IT Managers implementing and managing end-to-end chains.
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