Testing e-commerce systems: a practical guide

Testing has a crucial role in the overall development process. Given unlimited time and resources, you could test a system to exhaustion. However, most projects operate within fixed budgets and time scales, so project managers need a systematic and cost-effective approach to testing that maximizes test confidence. This article provides a quick and practical introduction to testing medium- to large-scale transactional e-commerce systems based on project experiences developing tailored solutions for B2C Web retailing and B2B procurement. Typical of most e-commerce systems, the application architecture includes front-end content delivery and management systems, and back-end transaction processing and legacy integration. Aimed primarily at project and test managers, this article explains how to establish a systematic process, and how to test e-commerce systems