While the Service Transition documentation does not restrict the project in the test methodology used, it does state the following test activities should take place:
- Validation and test management
- Plan and design test
- Verify test plan and test design
- Prepare test environment
- Perform tests
- Evaluate exit criteria and report
- Test clean up and closure
It should be noted that when implementing these activities for software testing they will not be undertaken in sequence. In fact, several activities should be done in parallel.
While ITIL does mention many different approaches to testing, one of the main objectives of Service Testing and Validation is to provide quality assurance and establish that the project will deliver a product that is fit for purpose and use. Risk Based test approaches support these objectives and, in particular, reinforce the Project Wide Risk Policy established during the Strategy phase. By determining and populating the appropriate Risk Matrix for an organisation or project, the Risk Policy can be better enforced through the Testing Process. Using a Risk Based approach, ITIL can provide a systematic method to: evaluate requirements; improve test effectiveness and efficiency; report progress; and gain consensus on high risk requirements, can only further support these overall objectives.
As a final point, ITIL is considered the world's most advanced set of IT practices. These practices cover many functions and activities, including software testing best practice. The enormity of ITIL can be daunting and it can be tempting to view it as too big or requiring too much bureaucracy to implement successfully. Certainly there are many initiatives to implement ITIL practices that have failed and there are many that have introduced excessively bureaucratic processes. But there are many more organisations that have benefited from implementing improved practices from ITIL that have helped alleviate problems that had previously plagued them. If an ounce of prevention is really worth a pound of cure, then ITIL could be a metaphorical answer to tackling obesity in our IT practices at a time when we are all conscious of the needto get into a healthier shape.
