Business Process Management

Ensuring the business outcomes you expect from BPM initiatives

Business Process Management (BPM) represents a discipline to continually improve business processes, and adapt them to changing business needs. BPM platform vendors offer capabilities to model and compose business processes from disparate services, components and IT systems. Using these platforms, business processes can be orchestrated, automated, monitored and continuously improved over time.

Business Process Management (BPM) represents a discipline to continually improve business processes, and adapt them to changing business needs. BPM platform vendors offer capabilities to model and compose business processes from disparate services, components and IT systems. Using these platforms, business processes can be orchestrated, automated, monitored and continuously improved over time.

BPM introduces an additional layer of abstraction in order to elevate process orchestration above underlying heterogeneous IT systems and components. However, additional layers of abstraction make it more difficult for all these layers to work together when integrating them, and harder to test and validate behaviors across interdependent components. This can be compounded by distributed team environments where each team is independently developing underlying, interconnected components.

Behind every BPM implementation, there is an integration effort that must be performed to orchestrate the activities and business logic that must be executed within the process. BPM integration testing often means manual testing of a near-completed system to "see if something breaks" prior to launch, or writing a large numbers of rote unit tests that provide limited test coverage over a small number of possible scenarios. Neither approach is sufficient or cost effective to accommodate the highly variable nature of today's business processes.

Properly testing and validating BPM requires the ability to go beyond user interface testing and manual validation of the end result of a process workflow. Instead we must verify each intermediate task contained within the end-to-end process, which may span disparate technologies, transactions, and machine-to-machine protocols.

BPM testing challenges include:

• End-to-end testing and validation that provides comprehensive coverage of underlying process components and business logic
• Verifying process outcomes capable of many different paths and permutations due to human interaction and other process variables
• Continuous monitoring of the processes' underlying services and components to ensure changes do not disrupt performance or availability
• Removal of business process testing constraints, including underlying IT assets that are either unavailable, inaccessible, or not yet completed by their development teams

The Solution

LISA provides a test, validation and virtualization solution capable of cutting through the complexity of BPM to deliver greater reliability, quality, and control of your BPM deployments including:

• Integration testing across a broad range of heterogeneous technologies and protocols, allowing you to leverage a single test environment and consolidated test cases for end-to-end process scenarios
• Automated business process functional testing and continuous validation providing the ability to quickly invoke and verify results for each distributed component to identify problems
• Load and performance testing can be applied at both the component and process level, identifying potential problems early and ensuring that performance levels are achieved
• Virtualized test environments that simulate the behaviors of dependent services and components within a process, allowing you to test earlier and on your terms with 24/7 availability. These virtual test environments also can simulate load conditions for throughput testing on selected components and services as needed

BPM implementations reflect the substantial complexity and interdependencies inherent in the business processes they automate. Component level testing and UI-based manual testing is insufficient to ensure performance and reliability for most BPM scenarios. LISA provides complete test coverage, continuous validation, and test environment virtualization capabilities to help ensure the outcomes you expect from your BPM initiatives both today and in the future.