Service Validation and Testing

The underlying concept to which Service Testing and Validation contributes is quality assurance – establishing that the Service Design and release will deliver a new or changed service or service offering that is fit for purpose and fit for use. Testing is a vital area within Service Management and has often been the unseen underlying cause of what was taken to be inefficient Service Management processes. If services are not tested sufficiently then their introduction into the operational environment will bring a rise in:

· Incidents, since failures in service elements and mismatches between
what was wanted and what was delivered impact on business support
· Service desk calls for clarification, since services that are not functioning
as intended are inherently less intuitive causing a higher support
requirement
· Problems and errors that are harder to diagnose in the live environment
· Costs, since errors are more expensive to fix in production than if found in
testing
· Services that are not used effectively by the users to deliver the desired
value.

Purpose, goal and objectives

· Plan and implement a structured validation and test process that provides
objective evidence that the new or changed service will support the
customer’s business and stakeholder requirements, including the agreed
service levels
· Quality assure a release, its constituent service components, the resultant
service and service capability delivered by a release
· Identify, assess and address issues, errors and risks throughout Service
Transition.

The goal of Service Validation and Testing is to assure that a service will provide
value to customers and their business.

The objectives of Service Validation and Testing are to:

· Provide confidence that a release will create a new or changed service or service offerings that deliver the expected outcomes and value for the customers within the projected costs, capacity and constraints
· Validate that a service is ‘fit for purpose’ – it will deliver the required performance with desired constraints removed
· Assure a service is ‘fit for use’ – it meets certain specifications under the specified terms and conditions of use
· Confirm that the customer and stakeholder requirements for the new or changed service are correctly defined and remedy any errors or variances early in the service lifecycle as this is considerably cheaper than fixing errors in production.

scope

The service provider takes responsibility for delivering, operating and/or maintaining customer or service assets at specified levels of warranty, under a service agreement. Service Validation and Testing can be applied throughout the service lifecycle to quality assure any aspect of a service and the service providers’ capability, resources and capacity to deliver a service and/or service release successfully. In order to validate and test an end-to-end service the interfaces to suppliers, customers and partners are important. Service provider interface definitions define the boundaries of the service to be tested, e.g. process interfaces and organizational interfaces.

Testing is equally applicable to in-house or developed services, hardware, software or knowledge-based services. It includes the testing of new or changed services or service components and examines the behaviour of these in the target business unit, service unit, deployment group or environment. This environment could have aspects outside the control of the service provider, e.g. public networks, user skill levels or customer assets. Testing directly supports the release and deployment process by ensuring that appropriate levels of testing are performed during the release, build and deployment activities. It evaluates the detailed service models to ensure that they are fit for purpose and fit for use before being authorized to enter Service Operations, through the service catalogue. The output from testing is used by the evaluation process to provide the information on whether the service is independently judged to be delivering the service performance with an acceptable risk profile.

Value to business
Service failures can harm the service provider’s business and the customer’s assets and result in outcomes such as loss of reputation, loss of money, loss of time, injury and death. The key value to the business and customers from Service Testing and Validation is in terms of the established degree of confidence that a new or changed service will deliver the value and outcomes required of it and understanding the risks. Successful testing depends on all parties understanding that it cannot give,
indeed should not give, any guarantees but provides a measured degree of confidence. The required degree of confidence varies depending on the customer’s business requirements and pressures of an organization.