The support of business by IT and applications is preferentially described by business process models as part of a solution blueprint. Typical requirements are the demand for more efficiency, lower production costs and compliance with different policies, standards and regulations. Hence IT applications are increasingly interwoven with business complexity. “How to ensure the level of correctness needed for customized applications to avoid impact on the business due to insufficient quality assurance?” is one of the major questions on this matter.In agile projects the key issue in terms of testing methodologies is indeed the setup of a valid and plausible metrics scheme that permits to measure and compare the quality of a solution continuously over a period of time.

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.

Business process models created in the blueprinting phase of an SOA or ERP project can be leveraged for managing and improving the end-to-end integration, user acceptance and non-regression testing. The blueprinting exercise can deliver you much more value than just documenting and scoping of a new IT solution.

Surveys from leading analysts tell that Microsoft Visio® is the tool that is used for more than 70% of business process management (BPM) scenarios. In complex IT applications like SAP® ERP or Oracle® ERP projects, consultancies and system-integrators create business blueprint documentation with Microsoft Visio®. With the integration of Visio® into the leading test-management suite HP ALM, our R&D team has closed the so far open gap between requirements and process management on one side and the test management of complex IT applications on the other side.