Extracting and Conserving Production Data as Test Cases in Executable Business Process Architectures

Abstract

Because executable business processes are an important and critical software asset of organizations because they control and integrate critical information systems. Thus, testing them thoroughly is a very important task within the software development process. However, failures due to implementation defects still occur in production, which in turn means that the development team needs to analyze, fix and repair the failing processes. In order to support the activities of reproducing the problem outside of the production system and to create better test cases for verifying the fixed implementation, we propose to use process mining techniques on the production process event logs to aid the support & development teams. With our approach it is possible to automatically extract a working unit test case with all partner services being mocked that can run in a development environment. Within in this paper we present the extraction algorithm, our implementation, and possible ways to integrate the tool into the support & development process. © 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.