Features: Business Process Validation (BPV)

Making Quality a Mandate of the Business Process

Effectively managing quality within IT to support business processes requires deep collaboration between system architects, technical implementers and end business users. Working with your process tools, LISA's features for conducting Business Process Validation (BPV) provide a rich set for discovering, modeling and validating complex business workflows across multiple technologies. LISA maintains test awareness of the larger workflow, while providing visibility into every detailed behavior of the business process, uncovering the root causes of functional and performance issues before and after rollout of new functionality.

The Challenges of Business Process Validation

Companies often map business processes initially as workflow diagrams, or as BPEL (Business Process Engineering Language) to describe business activity, which can be useful for conceptual purposes (and which LISA can model as a test case). However, in the real world we find that the practice usually produces a very high level, linear view or description of a business process, much the ideal process you would write on a whiteboard (or a napkin).

The actual IT runtime of business processes for any larger enterprise must be managed at a much more detailed and granular level, respecting intra-organizational policies, regulations, and leveraging the company's, and its business partners, technology standards, services and implementation platform(s) of choice. All of these must come together in a complex web of business logic and integrations to reach the desired outcome. At this point, IT and business analyst professionals often look to a more robust BPM engine or integration platform provider to define complex workflows, manage and enforce the rules.

Business analysts who understand the flow of information have the ability to augment and tie functional test cases together, gaining end-to-end testing of a process. LISA provides a rich feature set to allow collaboration of testing assets and data between developers and Analysts, solving the complicated task of interacting with many of the leading business process frameworks right out of the box.

How LISA helps BPM

Most test solutions can only get to the point of Invoking a particular technology in isolation, for instance only within the ESB, or at the WSDL/SOAP transaction level, while LISA provides all of these capabilities and validates the entire workflow functionally, and at load if desired, as it crosses all the components of your architecture. LISA basically puts the next step of any process under your control, no matter what the targeted technology is.

LISA BPV does this by rolling up the actual unit and functional software tests that need to be validated in component development, into higher level composite processes, that ultimately fit into the highest level business workflow orchestration context. At each level of the business process, there are specific Stakeholders that should participate by building and running LISA test cases that validate component level, service level or business process level behaviors.

Benefits

• Maintains business context atop technology layers. For dynamic, heterogeneous technology environments like SOA, LISA BPV maintains context across a possibly distributed set of systems like this to sustain reliable service levels.
• Ease of use maximizes collaboration. The test interaction you get with LISA's no-code, point and click testing environment can still be just as detailed and scalable as the actual end user process and traffic you are testing, and there is visibility into every behavior within underlying systems along the way. When everyone owns quality with LISA, the extended team's test productivity and responsiveness to quality issues drastically increases.
• Maximized test reuse through LISA BPV's new Modular Process Testing sub-process feature.
• LISA Pathfinder automates up to 80% of complex business process test discovery and design time by taking testers "most of the way there" with a fully captured business process test that has already mapped out the underlying architecture and pointed out problem areas and bottlenecks throughout the system.
• Extensibility is Key - At any point, a business process may need to leave the middleware world, where standards and commonly encountered technologies exist, to interact with a legacy or custom application that was custom built by your company, or a third party. LISA provides a powerful toolkit for test-enabling many of these technologies, making them transparent to the tester who is validating the business process.