How can I help Miami?
Since there is just one of you, you should just automate everything
A few days after I started this position last year, this was something that I heard regularly from my upper-management.
You should start testing “X” we get lots of updates for that so you should automate the tests for that.
This is coming from people who have never tested anything, and definately have no clue what it means to create automated tests. (Honestly I didn’t know what it meant when I started either)
Testing the Student Information System
So when you read that title “Testing the Student Information System” it seems a little strange that we would want to test a system that we purchase to make sure it works. That software isn’t our code it is software that we purchased so it should work, right? We we have run into many situations where we install an updated version of this software and when it is installed it immediately has problems. So how can we go about installing the software and helping the offices that use the software to validate that the new version works for them, and won’t negatively effect their productivity.
Also remember that I am trying to ‘prove’ that my job is valuable and that I can be of assistance to help test these upgrades but also the software that we are writing within our IT Services group. How can we be certain that what we provide to the offices is really what they need and it meets their expectations.
I’m also working to help the developers create better software. So all of this to say that it seems that that best place for me, the single person of a Quality Team to start would be to create some simple tests to ‘valiidate’ that upgrades didn’t break basic functionality that an office expects.
How do you test something to make sure it works if you don’t know what it is supposed to do
The first problem I came to was, how to I validate that a form is working if I don’t know how it is supposed to work. So I tried a few forms and manually searched for a student and validated that simple functionality. I didn’t think that would be enough to win over hearts and minds, so I had to go out and visit with a few offices and just talk over how they use some forms and if they saw value in what I was doing, or could do.
First meeting
I went over to meet with an office and try and explain how I wanted to help them with upgrades, so I could reduce some of the burden that we as IT put on them during an upgrade. I walked her through what I was thinking and she made a statement that rocked my way of thinking.
She said:
The biggest problem I face during an upgrade isn’t validating the functionality it is, that I go to a form to validate it functions correctly and the form itself doesn’t load. That is a bigger problem for us then, can I do ‘A, B & C on this form’
This change my way of thinking from, how can I help offices to make sure that the forms are functioning and is the functionality that you expect to be there still there. To helping IT to validate that when we tell and office that a form has been updated and ready to use, that the form is actually there and ready to use.
Now I can’t fault IT for saying that something is working and its not. There are over 2500 forms in our SIS, There is now way they could validate all of them, so they maybe test one form and then tell the office it is working.
In the next few weeks I will continue my explanation on what I am doing to help solve this problem.