Overview of Testing

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Chapter 18 Testing Process Definitions : Overview of Testing

Overview of Testing

TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks provides a testing environment for stepping through your process models and determining the sources of errors. Entering the testing environment starts a TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks engine. The engine starts process instances based on the process definitions stored in your project. You can select one of the running process instances to display in the design panel, and the currently executing activity is highlighted as the process instance runs.

In general, testing should be done during the design and development phase of a project. Testing a deployed project is possible, but might be difficult depending upon the volume of the workload of the system. Also, testing usually involves setting breakpoints in the process model to stop the running process instances at desired points. This is not possible in a production environment, so you may want to use a development system for testing purposes.

Testing a process definition typically involves these steps:

1.

Select the process definition you wish to test in the project panel.

2.

Set breakpoints in the process definition at points where you wish to stop a running process and examine its state. See Breakpoints for more information.

3.

If the process begins with a Start activity and the Start activity has a schema defined, you can supply input data to the process before executing it.

4.

Click the Tester tab on the left of the project panel. The project panel becomes the test panel. From the test panel you can start process instances or load more process definitions. See Process Instances During Testing for more information about process instances in the test panel.

5.

Examine the data of the process by selecting any of the activities in the process. The current state of the process data is displayed on the Process Data tab of each activity.

6.

Use the toolbar buttons (Pause Testing, Step to Next Activity, and so on) in the test panel to either continue through the process instance or to stop the current process instance. See Stepping Through a Process for more information.

Once in testing mode, changes to your process definitions are not reflected in the running process instances. Return to design mode before changing process definitions.