See Overview of Oracle Approvals Management.
To ensure your transaction type applies appropriate rules to each of your business cases, you create test transactions on AME's Test Workbench, or 'real' transactions in the integrating application. You can select a real transaction and create a test case from it for future testing or create the initial test case. You can store the simulated and the real transaction test cases for future reference.
The Test Workbench displays a list of previously defined test cases. You can select an existing test case and have AME treat this as a real transaction to determine the active rules and the final approver list. By copying a test case, you can have many variations on a standard transaction. This enables you to exhaustively test your approval setup. When defining or updating a test case, you can supply values for the attributes of interest. For the test case, it is possible to define header values and if appropriate create detail lines in order to mimic an invoice for example. The Test Workbench enables you to check for item level, approver level, and transaction level productions. In addition, it displays the attribute values for the subordinate items in a transaction. For debugging and testing, you can see the various stages of the approver list.
While planning you implementation strategy, your implementation document, showing your approval policies, should specify test cases sufficient to verify that your transaction type does the following things according to your business rules:
Fetch correct item IDs.
Fetch correct attribute values.
Evaluate the rule use correctly.
Process the rule use priorities correctly.
Process production rules and actions correctly.
Produce the correct default approver list.
For real transactions, handle inserted approvers correctly.
For real transactions, handle suppressed approvers correctly.
Process repeated approvers correctly.
Parallelize a transaction's approval process correctly.
Process forwardings correctly.
You can do most of your testing using the Test Workbench. You may also use SQL*Plus and the integrating application to test certain aspects of your implementation.
Use the Test Workbench tab to perform either real-time or simulated tests for the given approval rules setup of a transaction type. Using the Test Workbench, you can do the following:
View the name and description details of all the saved test cases for the given transaction type.
View the attributes and attribute-values stored in the test cases.
Update the existing test cases by clicking the Update icon. The Test Case Update page displays the attributes that you can update.
View the final applicable rules and the final processed approver list for a selected test configuration by clicking Run in the Test Workbench page.
View the different approval processing stages by clicking View Approval Process Stages in the Test Workbench page.
Copy a selected test case by clicking Copy in the Test Workbench page. AME adds a prefix to the test name as a new test case. You can later update the new test case.
Create a new test case by clicking Create in the Test Workbench page. You provide a name and description for the test case and also set the attribute values. You can add item class attributes and set their values from this page. You can either save the test case or invoke it as an adhoc test case by clicking Run Test Case.
View real transactions by clicking Run Real Transaction Test in the Test workbench page. This opens the Real Transaction Test page in which you can query for a given transaction (using the transaction-ID) for the given transaction type. After AME retrieves the values, you can test-run the approval process, by clicking Run Test Case. You can save the real transactions from this page.
Test forwarding behaviors. AME currently does not have any test functionality that would let you update an approver's approval status such as the approver forward. To test how AME responds to forwardings, you must do the forwardings by responding the approval-required notifications generated by the integrating application, and then viewing the transaction's approver list on the Test tab using Run Real Transaction Test.