It’s Not About the Clicks: Understanding the Other 90% of ePayments Testing Activity

• Preparation – Getting ready for the required testing
  
  Chief among the preparation tasks for payments system testing is creating a test plan. You must identify the threats and weaknesses to your processing environment that you want your testing to address. Prioritize your test needs based on various risk factors, identify events that would have the most impact on your organization, and evaluate the probability of those events occurring. Identify a high-risk or high-loss situation in which improved testing can substantially reduce risks or losses. You may need test plans for development, support, QA, regression or stress testing—depending on the event that precipitates the testing. Test plans should address all areas involved in developing, supporting, verifying and implementing the change or event. After identifying what you need to test, your plan must also specifically include how this tests will be executed (including equipment and personnel required).
  
  During preparation you will address such items as:
  • Test plan
  • Resource plan (assigning test personnel, scheduling any required test tool training, etc.)
  • Test data (accounts with required balances and velocity limits, transaction sets, etc.)
  • Equipment (test cards, terminals, ATMs, etc.)
  • Testing software
  • Monitoring tools (such as database profilers, hardware monitoring utilities, network sniffers, etc.)
  • Systems (setting up PCs with testing software, applying updates/patches, etc.)
  • Host test environment

The Concluding Phases: Reporting and Analysis of ePayments Testing

Now you’ve run your tests—the hard part is over, right? Maybe… and maybe not. Reporting and analysis are the final two phases in the ePayments testing timeline.

• Reporting – Collecting, producing, and archiving empirical data from ePayments testing
  
  After your payment system testing is executed, you are tasked with making sense of all the results data you have gathered. Although most reports include basic information about whether or not a test passed or failed, often additional reporting is needed. Typically, organizations need to associate the results of their ePayments testing with the issue (or bug) that originated the change that is being tested; that is, a “fix” is tested to make certain it actually fixed the original problem with the code. You must also ensure that your testing is well documented and the results are available for any users (or government agencies) that may require them. You may need to provide audits, traces, and log files that can be used for verification or certification of the testing you have performed.

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