Managing Financial Network Mandate Testing

Which items are mandatory and which are optional? Which items are optional now, but will be mandatory in the near future? "Mandates" may be a misnomer because, in fact, not all mandates are mandatory.

Consulting other experts

After you’ve made your initial pass through the mandates, you will undoubtedly have questions. Look to internal experts within your organization—such as network liaisons, developers, and others—for assistance. Typically, your internal experts can help you address issues such as:

You need to review the specifications for changes related to a mandated item.
You need more information on the existing processes (products, messages, etc.).
You need to clarify if an item does or doesn’t affect processing.
You need to develop testing for an item that affects multiple aspects of processing.
You need to become more familiar with the affected processing task before you can develop an effective test plan.

In addition to your experts on staff, you can also work with experts outside of your organization, such as software vendors.

Pre-testing activities

After you’ve analyzed the mandates, you will likely have noted some activities that you can begin even before your test plan is completed.

Assembling test accounts, cards, and data
Your testing may require specific test plastics, test card data, or test accounts. For magnetic stripe card testing, you may need specific track data; and for EMV card testing, you may need cards with specific applications. You may also need PINs and CVC data for your test cards.
Preparing for live testing
If live testing is required with your network, you may need to resolve any communications issues related to establishing connectivity, and you will need to agree upon a test script or test bed, or exchange test data with the network. Try to get these housekeeping matters settled before certification testing begins, rather than wasting your limited test time trying to resolve them.
Locating software to aid test efforts
First, be sure to check with developers for any automated test tools they may use during development. In addition, your organization may have other tools that could make testing easier for you, even though these tools may not be classified as "test tools." These may include editors for posting and log files, viewers for report data, and programs for auditing incoming and outgoing messages.

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