By Lakshminarasimha Manjunatha Mohan
Story 3: Quick and Context Driven Solutions at Critical Times, Leading to Success
A HRMS product from Sweden - the project scope was to migrate the existing COBOL based desktop application to .NET based web application. The solution was implemented by an automated verbatim code conversion from COBOL to VB.NET. As a consequence, there was limited knowledge about the application with the development team. The project was fixed priced, with any delay in release, resulting in weekly penalty. In this constrained environment, the challenge was to test the .NET application and ensure if it works exactly the same way as the COBOL application and integrate the product and make it ready for release. We had 4 weeks’ time to get about 8 modules tested, integrated and released for User Acceptance testing.
Description:
In the quick time to understand the application business, we conducted exploratory testing. Here, all the testing that was being done was checking against the COBOL application. So our test Oracle was quite simple; PASS in COBOL should also be PASS in .NET app and FAIL in COBOL app should be FAIL in .NET app, any deviation is declared to be a bug. Soon we realized that it is impractical to test the application manually and achieve the coverage within the available time to ensure the application quality. Moreover, we are very well aware that all the checking is for the machine and testing is for human.
We decided to implement a table driven hybrid automation framework that can deal with both, COBOL desktop application and .NET web application. This was not an easy task to take up in such a constrained environment, but, we decided to take this up with 3 expert testers. The result was that we had the automation checks that included comparing page to page on two versions of the application. With this, all the testing was shifted to night and we started testing every day’s implementation on the same day. With some extra work, we could start seeing the benefit right from the second day. Further, to help developers debug faster and integrate the modules with the system, we developed utilities for file comparison that was critical for 3-4 modules. For the reporting module, we implemented a utility that compares the data in the two databases and produces an output with the missing or extra data.
With all these, we could complete the testing with high coverage on the application and release it for UAT in an acceptable time limit. Overall, testing implementation helped the project to obtain complete control on the release.
Take Home:
Leveraging the experience and expertise of critical people possible and helped us to develop and deploy innovative solution at a critical time. This, eventually helped in completing the project on-time and more importantly, without loss.
Read Story 4 at http://spansys.blogspot.in/2015/02/testing-stories-from-spans-trenches_51.html
Context:
A HRMS product from Sweden - the project scope was to migrate the existing COBOL based desktop application to .NET based web application. The solution was implemented by an automated verbatim code conversion from COBOL to VB.NET. As a consequence, there was limited knowledge about the application with the development team. The project was fixed priced, with any delay in release, resulting in weekly penalty. In this constrained environment, the challenge was to test the .NET application and ensure if it works exactly the same way as the COBOL application and integrate the product and make it ready for release. We had 4 weeks’ time to get about 8 modules tested, integrated and released for User Acceptance testing.
In the quick time to understand the application business, we conducted exploratory testing. Here, all the testing that was being done was checking against the COBOL application. So our test Oracle was quite simple; PASS in COBOL should also be PASS in .NET app and FAIL in COBOL app should be FAIL in .NET app, any deviation is declared to be a bug. Soon we realized that it is impractical to test the application manually and achieve the coverage within the available time to ensure the application quality. Moreover, we are very well aware that all the checking is for the machine and testing is for human.
We decided to implement a table driven hybrid automation framework that can deal with both, COBOL desktop application and .NET web application. This was not an easy task to take up in such a constrained environment, but, we decided to take this up with 3 expert testers. The result was that we had the automation checks that included comparing page to page on two versions of the application. With this, all the testing was shifted to night and we started testing every day’s implementation on the same day. With some extra work, we could start seeing the benefit right from the second day. Further, to help developers debug faster and integrate the modules with the system, we developed utilities for file comparison that was critical for 3-4 modules. For the reporting module, we implemented a utility that compares the data in the two databases and produces an output with the missing or extra data.
With all these, we could complete the testing with high coverage on the application and release it for UAT in an acceptable time limit. Overall, testing implementation helped the project to obtain complete control on the release.
Leveraging the experience and expertise of critical people possible and helped us to develop and deploy innovative solution at a critical time. This, eventually helped in completing the project on-time and more importantly, without loss.
Read Story 4 at http://spansys.blogspot.in/2015/02/testing-stories-from-spans-trenches_51.html
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