Developing Procedures and Standards › Develop Testing Procedures

Develop Testing Procedures

Initial testing and testing after revision are important tasks in ensuring that the software is functioning as required. Develop test plans for CA Top Secret that you can use throughout implementation and whenever CA Top Secret maintenance is applied. Test the significant interfaces whenever vendor maintenance is applied.

All accesses to a particular resource are handled in the same manner. To CA Top Secret there is no difference between data set access through batch and data set access through TSO (other than facility limitations). All checks are done out of the standard interfaces that are part of the z/OS operating system and its access methods.

Check all access to resource combinations. Once tested in one environment, it is not necessary to check other environments that use the same resources. An exception is different environments run in different modes.

An effective test plan has:

• Batch jobs accessing programs, data sets, and combinations of access characteristics that are appropriate to the controls in your organization. There should be a set of jobs that always fail, with documentation describing the expected failures in the JCL, and another series that must successfully execute.
• Application simulating procedures for special applications (such as CICS) which attempt access to all resource types used in your organization. Functions should be set up to fail for documented reasons, and others must succeed.

The processes should be run by both normal users, administrative ACIDs, and undefined users to cover all possibilities.

By segregating the tests into resource types (for example, TSO/Batch versus CICS versus IMS), useful tests are available to quickly and effectively evaluate specific system changes such as a new release of CICS, or a newly installed CA Top Secret interface to an existing IMS region.

Save the test results for comparison with those saved from prior tests and for comparisons with the next series of tests, in case there is any question of correct system performance.