Paul Gerrard

First published 06/11/2009

Ten years ago, the Internet was a relatively small, closed networkused by defence and academic organisations in the US. When Mosaic, a graphical Web browserappeared in 1994 and became widely-available, the explosive popularity of the Net began,and continues today. In August 1999 the number of people connected to the net was 195m andthis is expected to be 250m by the end of the millennium. In the UK around 12m people or20% of the population of all ages will have access when the new Millennium dawns. If youhave a PC and modem the cost of connection is the cost of a local telephone call.

Because the on-line market is world-wide, unrestricted, vast (andstill growing), the emergence of electronic commerce as a new way of conducting businessgathers momentum. E-commerce has been described as the last gold-rush of the millennium.Since the cost of entry into the e-commerce marketplace is so low, and the potentialrewards so high, business to business and business-consumer vendors are scrambling tocapture maximum market share.

Although the cost of entry into the market is low, the risk offailure in the marketplace is potentially very high. The web sites of traditional vendorswith strong brand names have not automatically succeeded, and there have been some notablefailures. Many of the largest e-commerce sites were completely unknown start-up companiesthree years ago. E-commerce systems have massive potential, but with new technology comenew risks, and testing must change to meet the needs of the new paradigm. What are therisks of the e-commerce systems?

The typical e-commerce system is a three-tiered client/serverenvironment, database (often legacy system) servers working with application or businessservers, fronted by web servers. Given this basic structure, many other special purposeservers may also be involved: firewalls, distributed object, transaction, authentication,credit card verification and payment servers are often part of the architecture. The Webis the vehicle by which the promise of client/server will finally be realised.

Many of the risks faced by e-commerce developers are the same as forclient/server, but there are important differences. Firstly, the pace of development onthe web is incredibly quick. 'Web-time' describes the hustle that is required tocreate and maintain momentum. Few systems are documented adequately. The time from a newidea and deployment onto the Web may only be a few weeks. Enhancements may be thought ofin the morning to be deployed in the afternoon. Some sites, for example a TV news channelsite, must provide constantly changing, but up to date content 24 hours a day, 365 days ayear.

You have no control over the users who visit and use your site. Yourusers may access your site with any one of 35 different browsers or other web devices(will your site work with them all?). There is no limit to how many people can access yoursite at once (will your site crash under the load?). Users will not be trained, many maynot speak your language, some may be disabled, some blind (will they find your siteusable, fast, useful?). Some of your users will be crooks (can your site withstand ahacker's attack?). Some of your users may be under-age, (are you selling alcohol tominors?) Whether you are in retail or not, one way of looking at the way people use youre-commerce site is to compare it with a traditional retail store.

Anyone can visit your store, but if your doors are shut (the site isdown); if the queue to pay is too long; if the customer cannot pay the way they want to;if your price list is incomplete, out of date, or impossible to use, your customers willgo elsewhere. E-commerce site designers must design to provide their users with the mostrelaxed, efficient and effective web-experience possible. E-commerce site testers, mustget inside the heads of users and create test scenarios that match reality.

What are the imperatives for e-commerce testers? To adopt a rapidresponse attitude. To work closely with marketeers, designers, programmers and of coursereal users to understand both user needs and the technical risks to be addressed intesting. To have a flexible test process having perhaps 20 different test types that covereach of the most likely problems. To automate as much testing as possible.

Whether home-grown or proprietary, the essentials tools are testdata and transaction design; test execution using the programmer and user interfaces;incident management and control to ensure the right problems get fixed in the right order.Additional tools to validate HTML and links, measure download time and generate loads areall necessary. To keep pace with development, wholly manual testing is no longer anoption. The range of tools is large required but most are now available.

Paul Gerrard, 12 September 1999.

Tags: #e-commerce #Risks

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