Thursday, July 17, 2014

General project lesson: Testing

Following up on the technical post from yesterday I wanted to focus on another general project lesson, this time surrounding the testing phase of the project.  Obviously, testing suites are critical for the QA team to replicate what the users do but just as important as what they are doing is how they are doing it!  What do I mean here?

When we were researching the problem from yesterday key questions asked were: what is the user impact, and how do we replicate this?  At the time, we were not able to identify any user impact so it was really impossible for us to replicate this on command.  Until a week later.  Why is that?  The delay allowed users to encounter the problem timing out forms in the EBS application, because the key to this was letting the sessions time out.  What did we miss in testing?

We knew the steps involved in testing what the users needed to do, but we failed to record how they did it during the day by letting the EBS application sessions rest while they did other tasks.  Sure it was correct to go through the steps one by one in order, without pausing, but the lack of timing information caused us to miss this scenario and the problem that could have been found in testing.

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