Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Availability of test personnel for the partner systems,
Creation of log files for the evaluation of interface runs,
Alternatively: creation of synthetic data records.
7.1.3 Dedicated Procedure
The increased complexity generated by these additional requirements has to be met
by dedicated procedures. In particular they comprise the following measures:
Simulation of interface runs,
Early involvement during the development phase,
Evaluation of test protocols from the development phase,
Combination of synthetic and real production data for acceptance tests,
Integration of these elements into the standard acceptance process.
7.1.4 Simulations and Multi-stage Procedure
7.1.4.1 Simulation
A realistic interface test demands the link up of two or more partner systems. The
logical addressing of the systems has to be known and mutual access rights have to
be released. Thereafter the appropriate data packets have to be generated on the
exporting system and the interfaces triggered to permit the transfer. After this the
import into the opposite system has to be checked and validated against the export.
Because of frequent technical (parallel availability of all system components)
and political (system sovereignty) restrictions the above described procedure may
be shortened to gain plausible results in spite of these constraints. To achieve this,
interface simulations can be employed.
This means that on the same host system an export file has to be generated
synthetically possessing the expected transmission format. For
this certain
pre-conditions have to be respected:
The file has to be sufficiently large to permit performance tests. For this reason in
most cases a purely manual creation of data records is not sufficient, and a data
record generating program has to be written. This will produce additional costs.
Common errors have to be built into the file as they are expected to happen in
real business scenarios. These errors serve to provoke interface rejections.
This artificial test file is now transferred via an interface run of the import part to
the system under acceptance tests and the results analysed later.
Vice versa a generated export to a partner system can be copied into a local file
and then compared with the expected results.
