EXPERT RESPONSE
The most critical element is to distinguish between business process simulation and business process testing (with or without emulation). Simulation is the activity that is carried out by a business analyst to simulate the execution of the process outside the scope of a concrete system. Simulation helps analyze bottlenecks, assesses a variety of business flows, and to some limited extent--validates that the abstract process design delivers on the intended results in terms of the overall business flow.
Whereas business process testing is the activity where process execution is validated in a runtime environment that has been binded to the underlying SOA infrastructure with concrete bindings and services. Business process testing requires the direct involvement of architects and/or developers. Some dependent system may or may not be emulated as part of the execution tests. This exercise ensures that the process behaves as intended in a runtime context once bound to SOA services, business rule engines, etc. These two distinct testing requirements are complementary for optimizing BPM and realizing the ROI.
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