PeopleSoft Upgrade: Tesing Strategy & Requirements

DEFINING YOUR TEST STRATEGY

Although, you will not be performing the testing until a later time in your upgrade project, you will need to define the testing strategy before the project begins or soon after. Your testing strategy will provide the basis for understanding how you will test your newly upgraded applications.

There are several points within the technical upgrade process where your developers will unit test programs, but the majority of testing will occur after your application has been upgraded. Therefore, it is crucial to develop a plan, early in the project, for the testing strategies that you will perform.

WHY TEST?

Testing your database after you have completed the upgrade ensures that you can still operate your day -to-day processes on your newly upgraded release of your application. Therefore, your testing strategy should be based on these day-to-day processes and you should involve the users and functional leads that perform these processes. But first, let’s talk strategy!

PUT TOGETHER A TESTING STRATEGY

An effective testing strategy will require that you have a pretty solid understanding of the different stages of a PeopleSoft Upgrade. There are certain key stop-points or stages where certain testing should be performed. It is extremely important to know where these stages are,  and when the testing should be performed. The project manager and upgrade specialist should identify these stages.

Some of the stages will include testing the integrity of the data and meta-data structures within the PeopleSoft applications, specifically after upgradingPeopleTools and also when copying upgrade projects from your demo database to your copy of production. These steps are outlined in theupgrade instructions and usually include running and reviewing your DDDAUDIT and SYSAUDIT reports from your copy of production. You will verify that the system is working properly by reviewing the system online. After you are comfortable that the system is working properly, you can perform the Test Move to Production.

TESTING REQUIREMENTS

There is more than one approach and method you can take for testing your upgrade and you should evaluate your requirements by gathering key information about your applications and environment.  Here are some basic questions to ask:

• How many products and modules do you currently have in your production database?
• How many customizations you have in your production database?
• What you need to test?