In a recent podcast with one of Figafs IRT customers Mark Oshifeso from Anadarko Petroleum about testing SAP PI/PO we covered how they used the tool. We get a lot of praise from Mark for what we are able to do with the testing.
One of the things is that we cover is the Workflow vs Record Replay testing.
Mark created the following slide to explain the difference. You can view the full slide deck at SlideShare.
The Workflow approach to setting up testing is the to create programming that allows users to set up all test cases. This is really a powerful approach you can set up all kinds of integration. It will allow you to program everything like place a fine in this location or login to the SAP application and trigger a Sales order. And you can also make all kinds of validation of results.
The bad things about the workflow are that it requires a lot of work to set up test cases. So you need to be able to call the adapter in the correct way or you need to be able to check the file is placed correctly. Some validation can be pretty difficult to check if you need to call some third party system to get some status. You need to make every test different cases where you cover different so it adds to the complexity. And Labour intensive to set up. So you will most of the time end up with a limited number of test cases.
Record/Replay: This approach is the new way of creating tests. It requires that you set some boundaries to limit what you are able to do in an integration. So you will only be able to test a subset of the integration. The boundaries enable you to collect test data automatically if the system allows for some sort of extraction of the data. This extraction will then give an input file, and expected output. The input file can then be processed again and output should be close to the expected output. With this approach, you can set up test 100 test cases for an ICO in the amount of time it takes to collect test data. For IRT you can select many different ICOs at the same time
It also mean that the learning curve for picking up how to use the tool is much easier.