icegov2012 proceedings

equirements. A direct communication between the programming
and the test team was established and ICT was used for
transparency and reproducibility, e.g. platforms like Bugzilla were
used for bug tracking. For the testing this approach brought the
project team in the comfortable situation where they concentrated
all test resources on workflow tests for the administration
software. The project did not concentrate on single functionality
but looked at complete processes as workflows which were
walked through in the same way as election commissions
administrate their election. To identify bugs even before the
workflow tests and therefore increase efficiency of the
development process document tests were performed and every
developer had to test her or his software parts. Executed test case
results are divided into business process, usability after WAI and
security test cases. All results of a test execution at a certain date
are displayed by the amount of found or not found bugs (number
of defects or none defects) and their attribute (business process,
usability and security). The idea was to create a simple table
where execution date, number of found defects or executable
business process test cases are documented. According to the test
strategy it was not always necessary to test a new release with all
business process test cases. With every new release the test team
analysed new functionality or changes and discussed which test
cases are relevant.
Evaluation of the project´s test strategy can be described as the
following. Document tests have been implemented for assuring
that the requirements have been translated into good system
specification. Developers executed developer’s tests to check
functionality, specialists performed workflow tests to verify all
processes and the operation team tested the technical
infrastructure.
4. ELECTION
230.479 students were eligible to vote at the 21 Austrian
universities where the federation of students’ elections 2009 took
place. A total 375 races had to be decided, consisting of 21
university body elections and 354 study body elections. 2,411
candidates campaigned for 1,633 mandates. The electronic voting
ended technically successful on Friday, May 22nd 2009, at 6:00 h
pm. Until then 2,161 students participated in the elections. [4]
The project´s test approach turned out to be very efficient and
effective, however, only focusing on the technical level. Due to a
process error based misleading communication one ballot sheet
included an incorrect name of a political party. Furthermore
certain electronic ballot sheets did not include the short names of
political parties at all. The problem was an outsourcing of tasks
from the election commission to a technical operation team
combined with special designed e-voting processes between all
parties. After re-analysing the results from the electronic election
a certain risk level must have caused the critical situation. The
process and communication error was not discovered as there was
a separation into technical and workflow testing, where the
operation team tested their processes and simulated the activities
of the election commission but they could not test integration into
the election system. On the other side there was training for the
election commission where they tested their activities and actions
(workflows) but the operation of the e-voting system was only
501
simulated. There was a lack of communication in the workflows
between the operation team and the election commission.
As a result of these issues on December 13 2011 the Austrian
Supreme Court decided that e-voting at the student union election
did not fulfil all requirements of the law. They concluded that
election commissions must be able to verify the correctness of the
main steps of the voting phase and vote counting without the help
of any expert. This includes not only the detection of possible
manipulations but also the errorless realization. The decision
focuses on the use of an e-voting system but for sure also effects
the use of any electronic system for elections like administration
software.
5. CONCLUSION
The paper has shown that the challenge of quality assurance of egovernment
such as ICT supported elections lies not only in
fulfilling various standards or technical correctness of software,
but also in process management and IT-strategies at all
stakeholders. When establishing new technologies also workflows
change’s which have to be considered, evaluated and tested. The
case study has shown the need of process oriented approaches
when redesigning election administration by ICT support.
Furthermore this demands an overall IT strategy where quality
management is one part of it. Nevertheless, also due to the
decision of the Austrian Supreme Court, the election commission
should never lose control of process execution and process
control. Furthermore the authors believe that to gain trust the
challenge is to implement a QM process for the election system
where everyone – especially election commission and eligible
voters – has online access to the documented test cases and get the
possibility to test the software by their own. Transparency in the
QM process might lead to accuracy, correctness and to more trust.
We would call this a QM-trust-box.
6. REFERENCES
[1] Federal Computing Centre, BRZ, e-government IT-strategy,
http://www.brz.gv.at/Portal.Node/brz/public/content/unterne
hmen/struktur/unternehmensbereiche/10052.html#E-
Government, Feb. 2012.
[2] Austrian Government (no date): Hochschülerinnen- und
Hochschülerschaftsgesetz 1998 (HSG 1998) [Federation of
Students law]. http://www.bmwf.gv.at/startseite/
hochschulen/universitaeten/gesetze/studienrecht/hsg_1998/
[3] Austrian Government (no date): Hochschülerinnen- und
Hochschülerschaftswahlordnung 2005 (HSWO 2005)
[Election Regulations]. http://www.bmwf.gv.at/startseite/
hochschulen/universitaeten/gesetze/studienrecht/hswo_2005
[4] Andreas Ehringfeld, Larissa Naber, Thomas Grechenig,
Robert Krimmer, Markus Traxl, Gerald Fischer: Analysis of
Recommendation Rec(2004)11 Based on the Experiences of
Specific Attacks Against the First Legally Binding
Implementation of E-Voting in Austria. Electronic Voting
2010, EVOTE 2010, 4th International Conference, July 21st
- 24th, 2010, Austria