By Mark Trellis

April 29 2009 - The IT Infrastructure Library ® (ITIL) is a collection of books owned by the UK Governments' Office of Government Commerce (OGC) and available to the public.

After the first publication of ITIL, the amount of books quickly grew to about 30 volumes. The second set of ITIL publications (v2) was published with a specific goal of ensuring ITIL was more accessible to those interested in it, and to consolidate the information into sets that grouped these guidelines in to differing aspects of applications, IT Management and services. However, the cost of these ITIL manuals is still significant, particularly for non-commercial use.

ITIL version 3 outlines a broad set of testing guidelines and best practices. It does not restrict the project to following one testing methodology, but rather encourages the selection of principles that best fit the requirements. It does emphasize the need to reduce risk early in the project lifecycle and provides several suggestions as to how to do this.

Test processes are outlined within the Service Transition portion of the ITIL lifecycle covering the management of change, risk and quality assurance. Prior to Service Transition, project management is encouraged to develop policies that apply to the project as a whole. These include: Service Quality; Risk, Service Transition, Release and Change Management policy. One of the primary goals of Service Transition is to ‘minimize the risks from transitioning the new or changed services into production', by applying a uniform set of policies to the project as a whole and have them applied throughout the project lifecycle, the various teams are better able to enforce and follow through on set quality standards. By ensuring early understanding and buy in from Senior Management and/or Clients regarding processes and policies it allows the project teams to focus on core deliverables rather than re-educating or re-negotiating policies repeatedly throughout the lifecycle with the risk of altering expectations midway.