See Also

Ecora Policy Compliance Dashboard

Business challenges

Smartech QA team performed functional testing of Ecora Policy Compliance Dashboard software, that helped to detect and eliminate performance issues, calculation inconsistencies, predefined policies set design and other issues in the application. During testing process full set of QA related documents was created, including test plans, test cases, test scenarios and report templates.

Application description

Ecora Policy Compliance Dashboard is a powerful report generation system for comparing actual system configurations to user-defined and predefined policies and obtaining comparison results for all systems, individual systems and specific attributes. User-defined policies may consist of complex set of rules. It consists of ASP.NET module for displaying compliance results and policy calculation service providing smooth background calculation. Both application components are implemented on managed C++. Information about systems and policy definitions is stored in MS SQL Server 2000 or higher databases.

Testing approaches

Since the application is web based, generates reports from potentially huge amount of data, works with numerous data types, hardly predictable data, has considerable number of data comparison operands, stores internal data in the database and may be opened to be accessed from Internet, the following testing approaches were used to test the application: functional testing, UI testing, configuration testing, DB consistency validation, performance testing and security analysis.
  • Functional testing included validation of all features supported by the application: verification that reports are generated correctly, compliancy is calculated precisely, built-in policies are designed properly according to the most expected user needs. Smart redirection (in case of link misprints) was checked as well.
  • UI testing was made to verify that all controls are drawn properly in reports, email and printable formats match the requirements, UI design meets common standards.
  • Configuration testing was made according to test matrices and was performed to ensure the data processing is correct when data is stored in SQL servers databases with different collation and in different languages, that also included comparison when different data types are used.
  • DB consistency validation included analysis of data stored in databases, including white-box assurance that all database updates are made within transactions in order to roll back any partial changes that took place before full update completes.
  • Performance testing was targeted at background calculation service and was made to make sure the calculation does not affect the entire system performance.
  • Security analysis was made to check the site protection from unauthorized access, that users have access based on account permissions level, and protection from SQL injection attacks.

Summary

During testing of Ecora Policy Compliance Dashboard Smartech QA team posted over 500 bugs and enhancements. Ecora Policy Compliance Dashboard achieved the desired quality level. QA team performed all necessary testing in time.

Tools used for testing

  • TrackIt and Aqdevteam bug trackers;
  • Custom tool for DB consistency validation.