Going on rails with SAAS

Last week I finished a two-month test-job for Eurail.com, a small Dutch company selling Rail Passes to non-European residents. This company contracted other companies to build and maintain their e-commerce and fulfillment solutions.
That's why it can stay so small, because it 'outsourced' its IT to other foreign companies and still can have control over it by use of Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
For me, as a tester of this system, it was vital I knew what Eurail.com wanted with this new system and also to have a clear communication about this with Eurails foreign SAAS-partners.
I discovered railway e-commerce is a dynamic environment and changes every day.
To cope with this I made an initial dataset which had to be updated continuously and make generic testscripts for all parts of the e-commerce process.
And, like other testprojects, testspecification took a lot of time, but in benefit of testexecution, which took a shorter time.

That's my message this time: it is possible to test SAAS, but you do need good communication with all stakeholders and a generic testset and -cases so you, as a tester, can deal with a short time-to market.