Testing E-Commerce Systems: A Practical Guide - Wing Lam

As e-customers (whether business or consumer), we are unlikely to have confidence in a Web site that suffers frequent downtime, hangs in the middle of a transaction, or has a poor sense of usability. Testing, therefore, has a crucial role in the overall development process. Given unlimited time and resources, you could test a system to exhaustion. However, most projects operate within fixed budgets and time scales, so project managers need a systematic and costeffective approach to testing that maximizes test confidence. This article provides a quick and practical introduction to testing mediumto large-scale transactional e-commerce systems based on project experiences developing tailored solutions for B2C Web retailing and B2B procurement. Typical of most e-commerce systems, the application architecture includes front-end content delivery and management systems, and back-end transaction processing and legacy integration.