Test Panel™ App

The Test Panel App for is a case and business driven testing platform for Identity Management. It supports unit testing, integration testing, and automated regression testing. 

Test Panel facts

Test Panel App can run as a SaaS hosted application, or self hosted. 

Test Panel sets up your case steps by staging data into directories around your synchronization solution. This can include creating OUs, directory objects, HR records, Azure, SQL records, and any other data you wish to feed into sync. You are only limited by the Providers (connectors) you purchase. 

Test panel can run setup schedules include Imports, Exports, and Synchronizations. Additionally, it can run DOS commands, batch files, executables, and PowerShell.

You can validate your results as the happen, throughout the lifecycle, including testing the results inside your directories and the identity platform itself. 

You can rollback in your entire test set automatically, including rolling back MIM or HyperSync Panel. This is ideal for code, test, code, test approach. Ideal for rapid development and quick learning. 

The Test Panel App has the ability to emulate other systems. This allows you to test your integration with other systems, without actually have access to those systems, and then promote those changes into production automatically. 

Benefits of Automated Testing

Automated testing of Identity Management has three primary benefits for the organization.

1. It reduces development costs by shortening the project
2. It reduces risk through improved change control
3. It improves project outcomes by verifying business requirements

Reducing Costs

Automated testing reduces costs by dramatically reducing the time needed to develop and test solutions.

The majority of any identity project is spent in debugging, and QA testing. Much of testing is spent setting up data and waiting for synchronizations to run. Test Panel reduces the time spent to set up data for tests by connecting directly to systems that feed into your identity platform and loading and manipulating preconfigured data. Essentially, instead of manually entering data for every test, you enter once in your Test Panel configuration then re-use it as many times as needed.

Test Panel dramatically reduces time spent waiting for synchronizations because it runs synchronizations and programs in the context of test cases. When testing with small numbers of objects (like in most development testing scenarios), most of the time spent in synchronization is either tedious GUI manipulation, or dead time waiting for the Synchronization Service Manager to refresh (when using MIM 2016). Test Panel is often able to run dozens of synchronizations in the time it would take to an operator to do one or two manual runs.

Reducing Risk

State based synchronization platforms like MIM 2016 have a somewhat unique risk profile. The batch nature of sync means that it’s less sensitive to downtime than other critical tools. However its usual role of managing user accounts means that a configuration error can have devastating effects on the enterprise. Most seasoned identity professionals have horror stories of events like enterprise wide password resets or account deletions.

Automated testing controls risk by allowing efficient verification of existing functionality. Test Panel provides the ability to run tests and automatically verify the results in target systems. This allows effective QA regression testing without imposing unrealistic burdens on project timelines.

Verifying Business Objectives

Often when deploying an identity solution, it can be challenging to verify that adequate tests have been performed to provide coverage of all business requirements and objectives. Test Panel allows testers to create a mapping from business objectives to test cases.

With Test Panel it is possible to generate reports illustrating how objectives and requirements have been mapped to automated tests. Test Panel cases are repeatable and make verifiable assertions about how your synchronization platform changes target systems, so it is easy to demonstrate the results of a particular business objective on an as-needed basis.

Test results based on business objectives are a valuable deliverable that allows businesses to be more confident about implemented functionality before signing off on deployment.