Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
declares the provisioning for acceptance. In a first step acceptance tests are exe-
cuted with synthetic data by the customer. Because of the high effort usually
demanded only after successful tests with synthetic data a test bed with real
production data is built. In case of positive results acceptance is declared by the
customer after applying both procedures (synthetic and real). In this case errors
resulting from the data sources used are irrelevant for the final evaluation. After this
request management receives a feedback and acceptance is declared formally.
Log File Analysis
There are a number of instruments to analyse the results of interface tests including:
Functional results,
Comparison between export and import,
Analysis of log files.
The matching of a functional result—for example the execution of a plausibility
check—is carried out in analogy to the acceptance tests of any normal function and
will not be discussed here any further.
The instruments “comparison export and import” and “analysis of log files” have
to be viewed together. The comparison of data having been exported from one
system and imported into another one refers to the total number of data records in
question as well as to the quality of the import itself regarding the correctness of the
transfer. If errors occur the analysis of the corresponding log files can be of great
help. For this purpose logging has to be triggered for the test.
Log files can be kept in different formats. For this reason it is important to
demand a readable format from the developers into which the required information
has to be written. The format should also allow processing its contents (compress,
select etc.) with existing evaluation tools. Such tools could be EXCEL
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tables or
for example ACCESS
data bases. The information to be registered concerns all
transactions occurring during the interface operation. But they in turn can be
reduced to the relevant ones by clever filtering.
If rejections occur at the interface—meaning that the number of import records
is not identical to the number of export records—log files will provide information
about the reasons for rejections since the corresponding entries will normally
contain error comments by the system. In this way this information indicates the
direction into which to search for the deeper causes.
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7.1.5 Approach
Planning interface acceptance as a separate event
integrate all participating
>
systems
special
procedures
depending
on
the
constellation
multi-step
>
>
procedure
log file analysis.
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