WITNO5970116
WITNO5970116
Assuring Integrity, Accuracy and Robustness of the Service
To enable the assurance of key “technical” characteristics, and in particular the
integrity/robustness of the service (and therefore to support contractual acceptance of
number of criteria owned by Technical Assurance), we need access to “high level”
service design information relating to the business applications, in addition to the
infrastructural information currently available from the TED. This information could
be seen as sitting “beneath the SADD and above the TED”.
This information needs to show the key data/message flows between the components
of the service (that is, data/messages passing over the technical infrastructure) during
the execution of the business applications. “Component” in this context could be “APS
Counter Application”, “Message Store’, “APS TMS Agent’ etc.
Take, for instance, a “BES foreign” transaction performed at the counter. We believe
that this operates by checking through TMS to the home office to check for available
payments, but we currently have little detail beyond this to assure the integrity of the
transaction - eg how the check made, what messages are written, which components are
used (is an agent used at TMS, etc), and therefore what happens if certain components
fail.
Note that for this purpose we are not seeking highly detailed design documentation or
access to source code - we need to understand what data/messages pass between the
building blocks rather than the inner workings of each individual building blocks.
Access to this information will also allow a more informed view to be taken of testing
activities, and in particular the relevance and applicability of much of the technical
testing to the contracted-for services, as well as the impact (or not) of faults which may
emerge from testing.
Jeremy Folkes
Horizon Technical Assurance
21/5/98