Hi all. Just a quick note to share my presentation at HEUG – Alliance Down Under 2011.

My various other presentations are also available here: My Presentations

University of Auckland recently upgraded to PeopleSoft Campus Solutions v9.
In fact it was more of an implementation rather than an upgrade. Why an implementation? Well for various reasons, and to name a few:
Firstly, University was on a 10 year old version of PeopleSoft SA v7.6
Secondly, technically it was almost impossible to have an in-place upgrade. So the plan was to start afresh.

1 – Data Migration: While the plan was to start fresh, all the existing data was still supposed to be migrated across.
2 – Business Process: The business processes were re-written. Number of staff members was also affected by this change.
In saying so no institution that I am aware of has ever implemented an out-of-the-box or a so called vanilla version of PeopleSoft systems. We were no different…
2 – Enhancements: A long wish list of customisations was ready even before the process workshops had started.
3 – Interfaces: In addition to that there were number of systems that integrated to Campus Solutions – and all this integration was supposed to be re-developed using Web-Logic Integration (WLI) messaging system.
4 – Identity Management: To top that off identity management was being dropped from PeopleSoft and our internal Identity & Access Management (IAM) system was supposed to be re-implemented and integrated to PeopleSoft CS v9 system.
5 – Infrastructure: Wait there is more – finally, the infrastructure where all this was planned to be hosted was new as well.

Well, with these many changes in scope, there was no doubt that it will require thorough testing. Not just business process testing, but also all the other types of functional and non-functional testing like, usability, integration, performance, load, security, etc.

The complete project – from planning to implementation – was 20 months long. If you ask any traditional Project Manager they would say – testing will start some time halfway through the project and the Test Manager is only required may be a month before that. But senior management had decided they wanted to be prepared rather than sorry at the end of the project. As a result we had the Testing Manager involved in the project from the beginning. The testing team also started on the project much earlier than norm.

This was one of the aspects where we took a different approach from some of the traditional Project Management approaches.

The presentation will cover what else was different! An in-depth overview of approach taken by University of Auckland in terms of test planning and testing for PeopleSoft Campus Solution v9 implementation.