How to organize the automation process for the document editing quality control

The modern governmental IT-infrastructure is aimed at performing operations involving a big amount of internal IT-systems. Enterprise service bus (ESB) is used to connect the internal systems in order to allow business-processes to access several systems.

When there are defects in the ESB work, the business process can’t be executed, even though each sub-system works correctly. That’s why ESB testing is critically important. A governmental fund, which registers physical bodies in the insurance system and issues the supporting documents, contacted us with exactly this request.

When there are defects in the ESB work, the business process can’t be executed. That’s why ESB testing is critically important.

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Technical problems with deploying the testing process.

The project was difficult, because the customer has set the following criteria for the testing instrument:

  • Sending batch requests to the ESB testing with the property to provide up to 50 parallel threads. This operation imitates the process of providing help with filling in tax forms, which is called information format and logical control (FLC). While executing FLC, the system makes multiple requests to other systems and business processes.
  • The programming language was Python, because the instrument maintainer on the customer side mostly work with Python. Web-interface should be understandable for test specialists who have got neither the automated testing experience nor the UNIX administration knowledge. The interface should allow auto-test development, execution and update, as well as choosing the test environment.
  • A possibility of frequent and quick deploy with the minimal workload on the customer infrastructure and for the system developer. This requirement is caused by the regular ESB updates, as well as by the accessed systems updates.
  • The instrument should work on OS Windows.

In order to create a cohesive product that includes an interface, a test data storage, a test execution system and other components in the accordance to the customer requirements we’ve chosen the Docker software.

PFLB solution

The chosen project deployment variant is based on the DevOps Container Visualization method and is implemented using Docker. Docker is a development, deployment andexecution platform that allows to pack the application including its environment and dependencies in the virtual container, which can be ported to and executed on any system where Docker is installed.

This solution allowed to achieve the automation instrument portability: the instrument can be deployed with one command even without the Internet connection.

Achieved results

The developed solution allows to deploy the automated testing instrument and all required components from scratch with one click. A specialist from the customer’s side chooses in the web interface the desired tests and test environment, then they start the test run.

All tests are developed and updated through the graphical user interface. The unique part of each test data is generated automatically. Earlier the customer needed to update the test data manually for each run, which required several manual work hours.

The solution, developed by PFLB, allowed the customer:

to optimize the testing process thanks to the test automation and management;

to reduce costs and eliminate the possibility of human error while deploying and updating the testing infrastructure of the customer platform.

By executing several simple scripts the customer specialists can quickly deploy and update the testing infrastructure, without developing/editing the administration instructions. The task that used to take a day takes now less then half an hour.