title: Is Unit Testing Suitable for BPM Development?
body: <p>I'm currently working on a large BPM project at work which uses the Global 360 BPM tool-set called Process 360.  Just to give some background; this product works like a lot of other BPM solutions in that you design multiple "process maps" which define the flow of a particular business process you're trying to model, and each process map consists of multiple task nodes connected together which perform particular functions (calling web-services etc).</p>
  
  <p>Currently we're experiencing some pretty serious issues during QA phases of our releases because there isn't any way provided by the tool-set to automate testing of the process map routes.  So when a large and complex process is developed and handed over to our test team there are often a large number of issues which crop up.  While obviously you'd expect <em>some</em> issues to come out of QA, I can't help the feeling that a lot of the bugs etc could have been spotted during development if we had some sort of automated testing framework which we could use to build up a set of unit tests which proved the various routes in the process map(s).</p>
  
  <p>At the moment the only real development testing that occurs is more akin to functional testing performed by the developers which is documented as a set of manual steps per test-case.  The problem with this approach is that it's very time consuming for the developers to run manually, and because of this, is also relatively prone to error.  Also; because we're usually on a pretty tight schedule, the tests are often not executed often enough to spot issues early.</p>
  
  <p>As I mentioned earlier; there isn't a way provided by the current tool-set to perform this sort of automated testing.  Which actually got me thinking why?  Being very new to the whole BPM scene my assumption was that this was just a feature lacking in the product, but I also wonder whether "unit testing" just isn't done in the BPM world traditionally?  Perhaps it just isn't suited well to this sort of work?</p>
  
  <p>I'd be interested to know if anyone else has ever encountered these sorts of issues, and also what - if anything - can be done to improve things.</p>