Service Validation and Testing

Service Validation and Testing ensures, that new or changed services meet the design specification and business needs.

Scope

Service Validation and Testing creates trust and certainity to new or changed services, as this disciplines ensures the quality through:

• Fit for purpose (utility)
• Fit for use (warranty)

As it contains the testing efforts, it supports the definition of clear requirements for testability and establishes structured processes and workflows for test management. Issues, failures and risks are reavealed within this discipline. This is done through the following concepts, which are applied based on the provided Service Design Pacakge (incl. constraints and Service Acceptance Criteria):

• Policies
  • Servicequality
  • Risks
  • Service Transition (incl. framework)
  • Release and Deployment policies
  • Change Management
• Aspects
  • Service End-to-End tests (warranty)
    e.g. to ensure that the service is performant, secure and available
  • Technology tests
    e.g. bandwith, performance and ability to be clustered
  • Processes
    e.g. Incident Management, Problem Management, Known Errors
  • Measurement systems
    e.g. Event Handling (Monitoring), Performance metrics
  • Documentation
    e.g. release documentation
  • Skills
    e.g. hard- and soft skills
• Perspectives
  • Business
    e.g. for utility
  • Customers
    e.g. for functionality and expedient
  • Users
    e.g. for usability and user friendliness
  • Service Operation
    e.g to provide required knowledge or technological awareness
  • Continual Service Improvement 

Those items influence the test strategy, -model, type of tests and methods like prototyping, emulation or simulation based on scenarios.

Activities

Critical Success Factors

The following items are examples:

• CSF: Ability to understand and manage stakeholder perspectives
  • KPI:  Roles and responsibilities are defined for impact analysis and test activities
• CSF: Understanding of Service Transition risks
  • KPI: Less incidents or impact through incidents
  • KPI: Less delays through tests
• CSF: Ability to develop re-usable test models
  • KPI: Amount of defined test models
  • KPI: Amount of re-used test models