Testing a new version

[The Software Testing Club blog | November 29, 2011 | Jesper Lindholt Ottosen ]

Enterprise applications often come in packages and are purchased as (Commercial Off the Shelf – COTS). Every now and then a new version of SharePoint,SAP, Jive, OeBS, Microsoft Windows…. is made available and the business and product owner decides to implement the upgrade.

Usually the setting is that there is a “Factory Acceptance Test” by the vendor of the COTS package and a “Site Acceptance Test” by the implementing IT service organization. Here are some ideas that come to my mind, the couple of times I have had look into a testing strategy for a Enterprise COTS upgrade project. It’s not a best practice – at best it’s a heuristic:-)

 

Regression testing first – it might be considered to examine that quality didn’t get worse. Select some of the key existing features that is most important to the product owner, and examine them. Also involving the super users or application advocates in an exploratory testing activity will provide benefits for both the testers, the super users and the other project participants.

Interfaces – in an enterprise environment there is always interfaces to legacy systems and new “bud shots” to the IT tree. SOA services makes it even more important to look for known and unknown interfaces to the application. Similarly context specific customization’s (additions and removals) and applied “production hot fixes” having been applied or constructed based on v2.5. Analyzing the intermediate versions (above example 2.3, 2.4 and finally 2.5) including known fixes and known new features, can be another approach to identify the required levels of testing. Discuss with the product manager and business representative – the key is to find a level of test that they are OK with.