Testing of Enrolment management Solutions – A Success Story

Introduction

Our client is a leading solution provider to educational institutions in US. Their application technology is used at universities for students to enrol for different courses.

The Application has modules such as Dashboard, Survey, VIP, content and import. Students can have online chats with other contacts about subject topics and stay connected till the completion of course.

Testing Challenges

They were looking for an Independent QA Vendor to assist them to automate regression suite and bring down the regression cycle time to catch up with the sprint release.

Some of the key challenges they faced were test coverage, test efficiency, testing time and script maintenance.

Business Challenges

A QA partner to maintain accuracy, reliability and effectiveness of the application during enrolments, perform Load test the application to ensure maximum number of concurrent users and find other performance bottlenecks to improve the response time of the portal.

Our unique test strategy was instrumental in streamlining our client’s testing process in order to improve application’s functionality and performance.

Our Approach

We have devised an approach to meet both the ‘Testing’ and ‘Business’ challenges faced by our client.

• KT to understand the application functional features and architecture.
• Unique test design to ensure test coverage.
• Perform gap analysis and suggest a suitable Test Automation Framework
• Identifying test cases for Automation
• Created Check-lists to ensure the application functionality
• Adapt agile methodology and take part in Scrum Meetings
• Parallel QA team,  strategic overlap of time – for  real time collaboration
• Collaborative approach to performance test plan and implementation
• Test the application by scaling concurrent users for critical business transactions

Resource Growth over a period of time

Our Solution

The testing services we offered are listed below.

• Apply Yourselves: Functional Regression
• EMT- Connect ( Enrolment Management Technology- Connect) :  Performance Testing / Functional Regression / Accessibility Testing – ADA(American Disabilities Act- 508 Compliance)
• Constituent Relationship Management: Functional Regression and API testing / Security Testing
• Marketing Solution: Functional Regression

The main objective is to perform Automation & API Testing for their enrolment management application.

We have designed and implemented hybrid framework at business process level reliability, accessibility and dynamic execution of test suites on need basis.We created and upgraded a repository of re-useable test artefacts.

We also created a unified process and model for web application security testing and risk modelling. We used a licensed Rational Appscan tool through a VPN connected server to perform Vulnerability Scanning.

We have also recommended OS and database level parameters for subsequent production deployments for EMT and tuned session parameters for scalability.

Metrics:

Totally 1685 test cases were automated across all 4 application and 820 defects were reported during execution of the project.

We took complete ownership of regression script maintenance and used Rational Appscan and WebScarab for Web Application Vulnerability Scanning.

Our Value Adds

Business Level:

1. Business Value: Vulnerability Scanning and Accessibility Testing (Section 508 Compliance) were suggested by us in order to improve the PR and User Base respectively.
2. Total Cost of Testing: Client was using QTP. As the number of users increased gradually, the licensing cost was also increasing exponentially. We did a thorough tool assessment study to find an appropriate cost effective tool and suggested Selenium (open source tool) without compromising on quality. This eventually reduced their overall testing cost drastically.

Delivery Level:

We got a minimum time frame for gathering application knowledge our team gained more than 80% application knowledge in 2 weeks’ time and that made us to gain our client’s confidence.

Over a period of time, we were able to get control of smoke testing that happens on the production for every sprint release and on-going maintenance of automation scripts. Release cycle efforts were reduced from 4 weeks to 10 days.

Dedicated Test lab to provide end to end testing services