BPM 11g Production Readiness Checklist

Introduction

With the help of the other members of the BPM A-Team (Sushil Shukla, John Featherly, Siming Mu) I have put together a concise list of points that should be at least visited prior to moving into production with BPM 11g. Note that it is BPM 11g specific: although it touches on areas common to other common parts of SOA Suite (such as clustering etc...) it does not cover in any way other products within SOA Suite (such as BPEL, Mediator etc...). The list is by no means exhaustive, just a collection of points that experience has shown need to be understood and validated. Some may not be relevant in all customer projects. The items on the list are left deliberately without explanations - if the item means little or nothing to you, go away and research it, there are a collection of links to useful documents at the end of this blog.

Environmental Checklist – High Level

□           Validate Clustering & failover □            Verify DR □            Verify patching □            Tuning □            Validate load balancer, specifically algorithm and LB health check to soa-infra □            Validate IDM, access paths, security, authentication and authorization □            Research and test major component type and version (JDK - HotSpot, JRockit, 6/7, Browser - IE, Chrome, Firefox)

Testing Checklist

Functional Testing

□            All paths in all processes traversed □            Empty XML elements – Selection Failures □            Failure areas negatively tested □                           Boundary events □                           Event sub-processes □                           Fault policies – retries, manual intervention etc.. □                           Business exceptions □                           LDAP □            Tests for non-BPM code; pojo’s, stored procedures etc. □            OBR functional test (if not under separate lifecycle management) □            Validate dashboards, reports etc.

Non-Functional Testing

□            Load testing – average/peak □            Stress testing – how far can the system be pushed □            Negative testing under load □                           Inbound & outbound failures to simulate increasing load □                           Managed server failure / cluster failure □                           Unavailable infrastructure components – network routers, switches, DB etc. □                           Service unavailability – LDAP etc. □            Engine & workspace performance when DB both sparsely & heavily populated

Operational Checklist

Database

□            DB partitioning implemented □            Purging strategy understood and tested □            Other standard database operations for backup, recovery test etc.

BPM Technical Operations

□            Process instances queried, recovered & continued after failure both individually and in bulk □                           Invokes □                           Callbacks □                           Timers □            Re-Deployment / Versioning of new processes □                           Co-existence □                           Instance patching □                           Instance migration

BPM Business Operations

□            Query individual process instances based on business data – EM / Workspace / scripts etc... □            Alter Flow & alter data

Security

□            Auditing □            Intrusion Detection (PEN)

Configuration Management

□            Release Management, UAT and Promote to Production □            Version control system □            Environment Spec and Configuration definition

Resources

SOA 11g Database Growth Management Strategy Whitepaper FMW 11g Performance & Tuning Guide BPM 11g Performance Tuning FMW 11g Enterprise Deployment Guide FMW SOA/BPM Admin Guide - Partitioning SOA 11g Database Performance

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