Team puts new Student Information System through its paces

It’s testing time for Concordia’s new Student Information System (SIS).

Since March of 2013, more than 30 university employees have been working alongside Deloitte integration partners to prepare the university’s new SIS for a January 2015 launch. With most of the components in place, it’s time to make sure they all work together as they should.

During daily testing sessions now underway, SIS team members stand in for students, staff and faculty who will one day use the new system for virtually all student-related processes and business functions at the university.

Multiple processes involved

The comprehensive testing phase is a key project milestone and encompasses both functional and technical unit testing, as well as integration, scenario, user acceptance and security testing.

Integration testing involves debugging the processes associated with every step of a student’s academic career, explains Jean-François Bourgault, functional team leader for the project.

“We're at a point where we can test all aspects of the student journey from start to finish,” he says. “We can register a student, enter grades, run end-of-term processes, validate graduation eligibility, print a diploma and a student record.”

The “ping-pong process” of integration testing — finding glitches, reporting them to the development team, then re-testing them once they’re fixed — is an essential step toward making sure the system works properly when it goes live in January 2015.

Issues are fixed as they arise and the process is going well, assures Bourgault.

Massive scope requires detailed approach

Sam Durant, a testing analyst with the SIS team, is currently running test scenarios on components of the system that manage student records. “Student Records is the largest module, so it requires a lot of attention.”

Recently, Durant says, he spent an entire week testing the system’s capacity to calculate a student's current academic standing. Testing each aspect of the system is complex and time-consuming, he says, because each component draws on information from so many different areas.

“Everything is tested hundreds of times, and you’ll have five or six people testing the same thing from different perspectives. One person will be testing from a graduate perspective, one from an undergraduate, one from continuing education, one from a visiting student’s perspective, because all of these have different variances.”

The follow-up to this simulated test environment is User Acceptance Testing (UAT). This is where real system users have an opportunity to validate whether expected results are produced by the system. The SIS project team works on-site with users during UAT to enable easy support should situations arise from errors found during the process.

Finally, security testing is another major component of this testing phase – and is vital given how much confidential information is contained in the SIS. “We have to make sure a person who has access has it in the right way — neither too much access nor too little, just the right amount to be able to do their job,” Durant says.

“We've met with stakeholders to ensure their needs were assessed and met correctly,” says Bourgault. “Some of the processes are massive and involve a lot of people, but it’s been great to see how members of the Concordia community have collaborated to provide their input.”

Training begins this week

Training is set to begin this week on some system aspects, such as the course calendar and class scheduling, and later this fall a large-scale training plan will be rolled out to help all users learn the new SIS.
 

Learn more about how the new Student Information System (SIS) will transform Concordia.

Visit the SIS Renewal Project hub on Cspace for ongoing updates.