Over the last part of the year I have been looking at ways of sharing our internal test process with our customers. Some of our managers have been a little reluctant at spilling the beans of how we test such a quality product. But here are my reasons why I think this is a good idea.
Confidence Building - if you know how much time, effort and ingenuity goes into the test process then that will build your confidence that the new release is ready for production use.
Customer Relationships. Extensive testing of the product shows that the manufacturer really cares about the product and thus the customers that buy it.
Sharing of ideas. If I tell you what scenarios I have run to test a particular component, it might sprout potential usage scenarios for your business or application
Now I am not suggesting that we throw the doors open wide and allow every customer to peruse our test infrastructure. IBM is still in the business of protecting it's intellectual property so we do need to ensure that we protect any new ideas though publication or patent before talking about them.
A good solution would be to share our test plans with customers who are within our beta programme. If you are on the CICS beta program would you be interested to see how we are planning to test the new function to be delivered?
