Some Practical Considerations and a Methodology for Testing Autonomous System Integrations
Safiullah Faizullah · International Journal of Software Engineering & Applications · 2014
With interconnectivity between IT Service Providers and their customers and partners growing, fueled by proliferation of IT Services Outsourcing, with some providers gaining leading positions in marketplace today, challenges are faced by teams who are tasked to deliver integration projects with much desired efficiencies both in cost and schedule.Such integrations are growing both in volume and complexity.Integrations between different autonomous systems such as workflow systems of the providers and their customers are an important element of this emerging paradigm.In this paper we present an efficient model to implement such interfaces between autonomous workflow systems with close attention given to major phases of these projects, from requirement gathering/analysis, to configuration/coding, to validation/verification, several levels of testing and finally deployment.By deploying a comprehensive strategy and implementing it in a real corporate environment, a 10%-20% reduction in cost and schedule year over year was achieved for past several years primarily by improving testing techniques and detecting bugs earlier in the development life-cycle.Some practical considerations are outlined in addition to detailing the strategy for testing the autonomous system integrations domain.