Development, testing and documentation plan for a portal supporting internationally distributed research and education network: Case eBEREA

Abstract

An internationally distributed e-Business and e-Service research education network becomes a trend, and understanding the importance of development, testing and documentation in the network can increase its success potential. The e-Business Education and Research network for Euro - Asian collaboration (eBEREA) is committed to promote and facilitate collaboration in e-Business and eServices education and research, striving tor excellence in the field. The purpose of this thesis is to contribute to eBEREA in an international research network environment, focusing on the testing and documentation to ensure that the web site is easy to use and meets the needs of the users.

In the present research, the issues in development, testing and documentation of web services, and the methods involved are addressed. The site structure is extended toward more users friendly and user oriented. The testing is done from the aspects of usability, functionality, extensibility, performance, acceptance and compatibility. For the usability testing the web service is evaluated form the user's point of view. The functionality was tested for evaluating how the functions work against the specified requirement. The extensibility testing checks if the new function is easily added to web service application. The performance of the web service level was conducted under stress, and the acceptance measures the confidence of the service against the business requirement.

In addition the compatibility was examined to check if the web service works correctly in different operating systems and with different browsers. In addition, documents of project plan, requirement and technical specification, as well as test plan are devised in this study to assist the engineers from various organizations of the network for further development.

As a result, certain drawbacks were identified and case eBEREA needs improvement to meet the requirement as some defects occurred. User's need is a key factor to achieve the quality and success of the web service. More interaction with users is recommended in the future.