For BPA (business process analysis) many tools are on the market: ARIS®, CaseWise®, MEGA, IBM® Rational® System Architect, OpenText® ProVision and others. But you may say ‘this is well, fine and good, but the common siutation in industry and large organizations is that Microsoft® Visio® is used throughout business departments and project teams for business process mapping.’ This post reviews how Visio® process models can be leveraged for business-driven testing and the generation of test cases.
BPM-X® translation software supports all major tools to leverage business process models for a process-driven testing. Below we see a Visio® example of a cross-functional flowchart showing a common purchase/requisition process which can be executed with standard ERP software from vendors such as SAP®, Oracle® or Microsoft®. All organizations have their specific conventions regarding roles, the sign-off of process flows or the handling of documents.

Visio 2013 cross-functional process flow

The challenge project teams are facing when implementing customized ERP applications is evaluating possible process flows and then testing them.
With BPM-X® tools we help teams to leverage existing process models and automatically generate the required test cases with test scripts in whatever format, for instance Microsoft® Excel®. At this stage JIRA® comes into the game. JIRA® is a web-based issue management system manufactured by Atlassian®. This system has built-in workflows which can be adjusted for the needs of testing with different roles like test manager, engineers, testers and developers.
BPM-X® handles process models in a large variety of specific data formats.For a long time Visio® used to stored diagrams in XML; from Visio® 2002 up to Visio® 2010 this exchange format was called VDX.  Although each version had its own “flavor” all was more or less workable until this changed for Visio® 2013 when Microsoft® introduced the new and quite complex VSDX format called Office Open XML scheme that is used by all Microsoft® Office products like Word®, PowerPoint® or Excel®.
The BPM-X® translator tool has the capability to directly read and write the VSDX data format. This allows for the efficient processing of models captured with Visio® to generate test cases, for instance in Excel®.

JIRA for model-based testing

Test cases can then directly be uploaded to JIRA® via the standard JIRA® REST web services API. For each process model a summary issue is created in JIRA®, per test case a sub-issue is created and the test script is uploaded as an Excel® sheet.

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