Experience with industrial adoption of business process models for user acceptance testing

Abstract

Model based testing or the generation of tests from machine readable models has been widely deployed in industry for testing embedded systems and devices. Attempts are being made to extend its use to business systems. However, in spite of its potential for process improvement, its large-scale adoption for testing business systems is not yet seen, mainly due to little data being available on such use. This paper presents the findings from industrial deployment of a business process model based testing approach for User Acceptance Testing of large banking and insurance systems. The approach met with easier acceptance from the user community due to use of business process models and has proved to scale to very large models. It resulted in an overall productivity benefit of 20-30% in test design and planning, in addition to digitization of domain and process knowledge and has been successfully adopted organization-wide. Benefits as well as issues faced in large-scale adoption are discussed along with solutions found and open problems. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.