Finally having done with all the initial marketing stuff, the press releases and interviews now’s the time to blog about the most recent award-winning innovation coming from taraneon:

The Process TestLab

Yes, this is what we’ve been working on these past few months and what those rumours we saw spreading on twitter and the like were all about.

First off, the formal explanation, taken from our press release:

The Process TestLab provides a unique testing and validation environment for business processes. What this means is that the Process TestLab can analyse and simulate the behaviour and performance of processes even before they’ve been implemented, thereby saving time, cost and effort spent on implementing a process that might not be able to deliver to expectations.

We’ll no doubt be blogging heavily about the Process TestLab in future, but to give you a first idea of what it is and does, here is a quick overview:

First of all, the Process Test is neither a software tool nor a consulting service you can buy, it’s an independent Lab that provides answers to questions about processes based on tests and analysis we conduct. The TestLab allows us to put processes through three different quality gates:

• Completeness,
• Risk and Performance and
• Acceptance

Completeness: Feeding your process description into our lab systems we check the completeness of the provided process or scenario, i.e. are there gaps with bits and pieces of logic or functionality missing etc. Our systems also check the loops, the branchings and other design elements that might lead to problems. This check shows us whether we’re actually working with an executable process, regardless of performance issues.

Risk and Performance: What we’re looking at here is to determine how the variations of the various input parameters affect the process and what consequences this would have. Sounds complicated so lets take it in steps: Firstly, our systems create an executable process. Yes, we actually RUN the process, instead of simply doing simulations runs over a process model! The reason is easy to understand: Only when a process is put through a live situation under varying conditions can its logic be checked, its behaviour evaluated and its results and performance checked against requirements. So, using that runtime version of the process we created, we subject it to two stresstests:

• The first stresstest we run calculates the performance of the scenarios under a given set of conditions.
• The second stresstest does the opposite, it varies the conditions under which the process might have to operate.

The reason for this two-tiered approach is that while a process might reach its objectives under one set of conditions, it could well fail oder underperform when those conditions change. This second stresstest allows us to identify the operational limits of the process.

The third area of the process the Lab evaluates is the ressource allocation.

All this gets us to a point in our analysis where we have proven that the process is executable and how it would perform.

But as we all know, a process doesn’t work all by itself, it also has to fit to the company and staff using it. This is where the acceptance tests come in.

Acceptance: The acceptance tests directly involve the client. Our validation system takes the users through the process step by step….not the mode but the actual runtime process with simulated applications. Once we’ve completed this step-by-step validation, we subject the process workers to the stress validation, this time not focussing on whether the process can handle the stress but if the ‘loaded’ process can be handled by employees working on numerous process instances which is something you can normally only determine once a process is operational.

So, this is the broad overview of what the Process TestLab does. If you want to find out more, check the Process TestLab website and revisit our blog from time to time.