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Thursday, September 23, 2010

Ten Key Principles of Effective E-Commerce Testing


Over the decades since Information Technology (IT) became a major factor in business life, problems and challenges such as those now faced by the e-commerce community have been met and solved.  Key testing principles have emerged and these can be successfully applied to the e-commerce situation.
Principle 1.  Testing is a risk management processThe most important lesson we have learned about software testing is that it is one of the best mechanisms we have for managing the risk to businesses of unsuccessful IT applications.  Effective testing adopts a strategy that is tailored to the type of application or service being tested, the business value of the application or service, and the risks that would accompany its failure.  The detailed planning of the testing and the design of the tests can then be conformed by the strategy into a business-focused activity that adds real business value and provides some objective assessment of risk at each stage of the development process.  Plans should include measures of risk and value and incorporate testing and other quality-related activities that ensure development is properly focused on achieving maximum value with minimum risk.  Real projects may not achieve everything that is planned, but the metrics will at least enable us to decide whether it would be wise to release an application for live use.
Principle 2.  Know the value of the applications being tested To manage risk effectively, we must know the business value of success as well as the cost of failure.  The business community must be involved in setting values on which the risk assessment can be based and committed to delivering an agreed level of quality.

Principle 3.  Set clear testing objectives and criteria for successful completion (including test coverage measures):  When testing an e-commerce site, it would be very easy for the testing to degenerate into surfing, due to the ease of searching related sites or another totally unrelated site.  This is why the test programme must be properly planned, with test scripts giving precise instructions and expected results.  There will also need to be some cross-referencing back to the requirements and objectives, so that some assessment can be made of how many of the requirements have been tested at any given time.  Criteria for successful completion are based on delivering enough business value, testing enough of the requirements to be confident of the most important behaviour of the site, and minimising the risk of a significant failure.  These criteria – which should be agreed with the business community - give us the critical evidence that we need in deciding readiness to make the site accessible to customers.
Principle 4.  Create an effective test environment:  It would be very expensive to create a completely representative test environment for e-commerce, given the variety of platforms and the use of the Internet as a communications medium.  Cross-platform testing is, naturally, an important part of testing any multi-platform software application.  In the case of e-commerce, the term ‘cross-platform’ must also extend to include ‘cross-browser’.  In order to ensure that a site loads and functions properly from all supported platforms, as much stress and load testing as possible should be performed.  As an absolute minimum, several people should be able to log into the site and access it concurrently, from a mixture of the browsers and platforms supported.  The goal of stress and load testing, however, is to subject the site to representative usage levels.  It would, therefore, be beneficial to use automated tools, such as Segue’s SilkPerformer or Mercury Interactive’s LoadRunner, for performance/load testing.
Principle 5.  Test as early as possible in the development cycle:  It is already well understood and accepted in the software engineering community that the earlier faults are detected, the cheaper the cost of rectification.  In the case of an e-commerce site, a fault found after shipping will have been detected as a failure of the site by the marketplace, which is potentially as large as the number of Internet users.  This has the added complication of loss of interest and possibly the loss of customer loyalty, as well as the immediate cost of fixing the fault.  The fact that e-commerce development is rapid and often based on changing requirements makes early testing difficult, but testing strategies have been developed by the RAD community, and these can be mobilised for support.   Perhaps the most important idea in RAD is the joint development team, allowing users to interact with the developers and validate product behaviour continuously from the beginning of the development process.  RAD utilises product prototypes, developed in a series of strictly controlled ‘timeboxes’ – fixed periods of time during which the prototype can be developed and tested – to ensure that product development does not drift from its original objectives.  This style of web development makes testing an integral part of the development process and enhances risk management throughout the development cycle.
Principle 6.  User Acceptance Testing (UAT) The client or ultimate owner of the e-commerce site should perform field testing and acceptance testing, with involvement from the provider where needed, at the end of the development process.  Even if RAD is used with its continuous user testing approach, there are some attributes of an e-commerce site that will not be easy (or even possible, in some cases) to validate in this way.  Some form of final testing that can address issues such as performance and security needs to be included as a final confirmation that the site will perform well with typical user interactions.  Where RAD is not used, the scope of the provider’s internal testing coverage and user acceptance testing coverage should be defined early in the project development lifecycle (in the Test Plan) and revisited as the project nears completion, to assure continued alignment of goals and responsibilities. UAT, however, should not be seen as a beta-testing activity, delegated to users in the field before formal release.   E-commerce users are becoming increasingly intolerant of poor sites, and technical issues related to functionality, performance or reliability have been cited as primary reasons why customers have abandoned sites.  Early exposure of users to sites with problems increases the probability that they will find the site unacceptable, even if developers continue to improve the site during beta testing.
Principle 7.  Regression testing:  Applications that change need regression testing to confirm that changes did not have unintended effects, so this must be a major feature of any e-commerce testing strategy.  Web-based applications that reference external links need regular regression testing, even if their functionality does not change, because the environment is changing continuously. Wherever possible, regression testing should be automated, in order to minimise the impact on the test schedule.

Principle 8.  Automate as much as possible:  This is a risky principle because test automation is fraught with difficulties.  It has been said that a fool with a tool is still a fool, and that the outcome of automating an unstable process is faster chaos, and both of these are true.  Nevertheless, the chances of getting adequate testing done in the tight time scales for an e-commerce project and without automation are extremely slim.  The key is to take testing processes sufficiently seriously that you document them and control them so that automation becomes a feasible option – then you select, purchase and install the tools.  It will not be quick or cheap – but it might just avoid a very expensive failure.

Principle 9.  Capture test incidents and use them to manage risk at release time:  A test incident is any discrepancy between the expected and actual results of a test.  Only some test incidents will relate to actual faults; some will be caused by incorrect test scripts, misunderstandings or deliberate changes to system functionality.  All incidents found must be recorded via an incident management system (IMS), which can then be used to ascertain what faults are outstanding in the system and what the risks of release might be. Outstanding incidents can be one of the completion criteria that we apply, so the ability to track and evaluate the importance of incidents is crucial to the management of testing.

Principle 10.  Manage change properly to avoid undoing all the testing effort:  Things change quickly and often in an e-commerce development and management of change can be a bottleneck, but there is little point in testing one version of a software application and then shipping a different version; not only is the testing effort wasted, but the risk is not reduced either.  Configuration Management tools, such as PVCS and ClearCase, can help to minimise the overheads of change management, but the discipline is the most important thing.

What are the Testing Challenges in e-Commerce


Business Issues

A successful e-commerce application is:

  1.   Usable:  Problems with user interfaces lose clients.
  2.   Secure:  Privacy, access control, authentication, integrity and    non-repudiation are big issues.
  3.   Scaleable:  Success will bring increasing demand.
  4.   Reliable: Failure is unthinkable for a business critical system.
  5.   Maintainable:  High rates of change are fundamental to e-commerce.
  6.   Highly available:  Downtime is too expensive to tolerate.

These characteristics relate in part to the web technology that usually underlies e-commerce applications, but they are also dependent on effective integration and effective back-end applications.  E-commerce integrates high value, high risk, high performance business critical systems, and it is these characteristics that must dominate the approach to testing because it is these characteristics that determine the success of e-commerce at the business level.

Technical Issues


The development process for e-commerce has unique characteristics and some associated risks.  It is generally recognised that a ‘web year’ is about 2 months long.  In other words, a credible update strategy would need to generate e-commerce site updates roughly monthly.  For this reason, Rapid Application Development (RAD) techniques predominate in the e-commerce environment, and in some cases development is even done directly in a production environment rather than in a separate development environment.  RAD techniques are not new, and it is generally agreed that they work best where functionality is visible to the user – so web site development would seem to be an ideal application area.  Unfortunately, though, other aspects of e-commerce are at least as important as the front-end.  The end-to-end integration of business processes and the consequent severe constraints placed on intermediate processes make them less than ideal application areas for RAD.

These changes increase risk and create new challenges for testers, because time pressures militate against spending a longer time testing sites before they are released.  At the same time, the technical environment of front-end systems is changing very rapidly, so change is imposed on e-commerce sites even when the site itself is not changing.  This requires more regression testing than would be expected in a conventional application to ensure that the site continues to function acceptably after changes to browsers, search engines and portals.  New issues have also come to the fore for testers, notably security of transactions and the performance of web sites under heavy load conditions.

If we consider an e-commerce site as made up of a front end (the human-computer interface), a back end (the software applications underlying the key business processes) and some middleware (the integrating software to link all the relevant software applications), we can consider each component in isolation.

 

Front End Systems


Static Testing.  The front end of an e-commerce site is usually a web site that needs testing in its own right.   The site must be syntactically correct, which is a fairly straightforward issue, but it must also offer an acceptable level of serviceon one or more platforms, and have portability between chosen platforms.  It should be tested against a variety of browsers, to ensure that images seen across browsers are of the same quality.  Usability is a key issue and testing must adopt a user perspective.  For example, the functionality of buttons on a screen may be acceptable in isolation, but can a user navigate around the site easily and does information printed from the site look good on the page when printed?  It is also important to gain confidence in the security of the site.  Many of these tests can be automated by creating and running a file of typical user interactions – useful for regression testing and to save time in checking basic functionality.

Dynamic Testing:  Applications attached to an e-commerce site, either by CGI programming or server extensions, will need to be tested by creating scenarios that generate calls to these attached applications, for example by requiring database searches.  The services offered to customers must be systematically explored, including the turnaround time for each service and the overall server response.  This, too, must be exercised across alternative platforms, browsers and network connections.  E-commerce applications are essentially transaction-oriented, based on key business processes, and will require effective interfacing between intranet-based and extranet-based applications.
      

Back End Systems:

The back end of e-commerce systems will typically include ERP and database applications.  Back end testing, therefore, is about business application testing and does not pose any new or poorly understood problems from a business perspective, but there are potential new technical problems, such as server load balancing.  Fortunately, client-server system testing has taught the testing community many valuable lessons that can be applied in this situation.  What is essential, however, is to apply the key front end testing scenarios to the back end systems.  In other words, the back end systems should be driven by the same real transactions and data that will be used in front end testing.  The back end may well prove to be a bottleneck for user services, so performance under load and scalability are key issues to be addressed.  Security is an issue in its own right, but also has potential to impact on performance.

Middleware and Integration:


Integration is the key to e-commerce. In order to build an e-commerce application, one or more of the following components are usually integrated:

  1.  Database Server
  2.  Server-side application scripts/programs
  3.  Application server
  4.  HTML forms for user interface
  5.  Application scripts on the client
  6.  Payment server
  7.  Scripts/programs to integrate with legacy back-end systems

The process of developing an e-commerce site is significantly different from developing a web site – commerce adds extra levels of complexity.   One highly complex feature is that of integration.

If an application is being built that uses a database server, web server and payment server from different vendors, there is considerable effort involved in networking these components, understanding connectivity-related issues and integrating them into a single development (executable) environment.  If legacy code is involved, this adds a new dimension to the problem, since time will need to be invested in understanding the interfaces to the legacy code, and the likely impact of any changes.

It is also crucial to keep in mind the steep learning curve associated with cutting-edge technologies.  Keeping pace with the latest versions of the development tools and products to be integrated, their compatibility with the previous versions, and investigating all the new features for building optimal solutions for performance can be a daunting task.  Also, since e-commerce applications on the web are a relatively new phenomenon, there are unlikely to be any metrics on similar projects to help with project planning and development.

The maintenance tasks of installing and upgrading applications can also become very involved, since they demand expertise in:

  1. Database administration.
  2. Web server administration.
  3. Payment server administration.
  4. Administration of any other special tools that have been integrated into the site.
  5. Technical support should also be borne in mind.

Correctly functioning back-end and front-end systems offer no guarantees of reliable overall functionality or performance.  End-to-end testing of complete integrated architectures, using realistic transactions, is an essential component.