Case Studies
Operational Acceptance testing for international healthcare and insurance provider
The Client
An international healthcare and insurance provider with operations in four continents and more than seven million customers. More than half of the UK's top companies are its customers.
Business Needs
The client aimed at ensuring that the newly-developed system was operable in the simulated production environment before the final deployment in production. It asked for a seamless integration between the variant interfaces around the new application, which meant that the application deployment in production was to happen in multiple logical phases such as Tech Builds, Dry Runs and Dress Rehearsals. Finally, the core application was to be tested meticulously to ensure that the transition to the new application does not pose any tangible or intangible losses (financial or customer satisfaction).
Business Challenges
One of the major challenges in the project was the testing required for the data integration points and functional integration of 24 Interfaces. Business scenarious providing the mandatory set of test cases had to be identified. Critically, the testing had a high risk factor that it was to happen on live data and batches were to be run in a manner as if they were running in production environment. This had to be done virtually overnight.
Datamatics Solution
To achieve a successful operational acceptance test, the entire test was divided into multiple sequential phases:
- Tech build: Interfaces are tested for data integration and functional integration so as to provide a high level of confidence to the stakeholders. Issues encountered during the tech build phase are logged into the quality center.
- Dry Run: The high risk business scenarios and the mandatory set of test cases are identified. Once these are reviewed by the business users, the test cases are executed in dry run build. Issues encountered during the Dry run build phase are logged into the quality center.
- Dress rehearsal: Business scenario is identified and tested on live data. The live data is recorded to enable reverting to the original state. Issues encountered during the dress rehearsal build phase are logged into the quality center with identification marked as 'production known issue'
Benefits
- Categorised defects raised across the board – a critical activity (route defect placed in appropriate queue resulting in reduced time & effort on development)
- Suggested workaround for defects resulting in reduced rework
Technology
Client server
Servers: Sun Solaris, BizTalk, PeopleSoft, Windows NT and Windows 2000
Clients: Windows XP
Databases: Oracle 9i
Browsers: NA
Test Tools: TOAD, PL SQL Developer
To know more about solutions for international humanitarian or not-for-protit organizations from Datamatics, please write to business@datamatics.com.
