Insurance book conversion and acceptance testing

This article from Insurance Networking looks at converting a book of business to a new system.

This can be viewed by some as the riskiest part of a new system implementation. However, with proper time and resources, migrations need not be feared. They are all part of the system migration, which is to enable the company to improve its ROI and competitiveness. Each company needs to assess the cost, time and benefits, and if sufficient resources and time are allocated, success is manageable.

In single-phase conversions, all data is converted at one time with two options. Sufficient history levels (number of years) are converted that enables the discontinuance of the existing system. And the latest versions of data are converted to allow the new system to be used for all future transactions. The existing system is retained for a period of time for inquiry purposes into past transactions.

The advantages of a single-phase conversion are that the required resources are used for the lowest amount of time and therefore costs. Longer conversions run the risk of losing some resources, which need to be replaced, leading to a lengthier task.

In a multi-phase conversion, data is segmented by line of business or territory. The initial phase will encompass the installation of the whole system but will include only a portion of the portfolio. This will include underwriting, billing, claims, reinsurance, document issuance, management reporting, financial reporting and bureau filing. Each module will be tested using a portion of the portfolio. The initial phase is comparable to a single-phase implementation as the whole system is tested.

Subsequent phases involve adding other parts of the portfolio. This mostly affects the underwriting system to ensure proper rating, document issuance etc. These are much smaller phases and can be achieved with fewer resources. The portfolio being added needs to be tested through all modules (billing, claims, reporting, etc.). However as these modules have already been tested the additional work relates to tracing the new transactions through the system to ensure that they are being processed correctly.

The multi-phase approach can be implemented where each phase is implemented, user acceptance testing completed and then goes live as they are completed. Alternatively, each phase is completed up to the user acceptance testing, and only after all parts of the portfolio have been completed is the system put into live production.

UAT from Princeton

Some advice from Princeton on User acceptance testing.

"In this phase, the system is fully tested by the client community against the requirements defined in the analysis and design stages, corrections are made as required, and the Production system is built. "

It contains an outline of the deliverables (along with templates of some of them such as the User acceptance sign off template. It also contains a 10 step approach for user acceptance testing (UAT). It is part of the overall Princeton development method for constructing information technology systems and applications.

UAT and how IT works

From Find out how “IT” works.

In this case, “IT” is not limited to information technology, but whatever “it” is – the requirements process, the project management process, the testing process, etc. The better you as a customer understand “it,” the more effective you will be in making “it” work for you.

Donna Corrigan from CoBank suggests: “When defining requirements, stay focused on value-added business requirements, not technology. Understand the user acceptance testing (UAT) schedule early on, and clear the calendars of UAT business staff during the UAT period.”

Bill Yock from The University of Washington says: "The most important thing a customer of a BI project should insist on is "World Class" training. Incorporate training on both the meaning of the data and the use of the business intelligence tools. Many BI projects invest too much in the ‘back room’ data loading and integration of warehouses and marts, and not enough in the ‘front door’ … educating and informing users on how to interpret, analyze and understand their information. One of our mission statements was ‘Free the Data.’ Unfortunately, once the data was free, nobody understood it. This led to lack of confidence in the ‘numbers’ and adoption of the BI tool hit a brick wall."

To be a good BI customer, figure out what “it” is and how you can proactively influence and invest time in requirements, data models, prioritization, governance, testing, training, etc. Don’t allow yourself to be so dependent that you passively sit back and wait for “IT” to make everything happen.

Testing contactless cards

From Contactless News

Taco Bell has become the latest national fast food chain to enter the contactless arena. It will be testing Visa contactless cards at 100 locations later this year with an eye towards implementing the technology at all 1,300 locations in 2008. The credit card giant also announced that a movie theater, a northeast supermarket operation and an ice cream chain are now accepting Visa contactless cards.

Visa USA announced that four significant national and regional merchants are the latest to accept Visa cards with embedded contactless payment technology, allowing consumers to use the convenience of this innovative technology to buy food, groceries and movie tickets at more than 3,000 new acceptance locations.

The four companies – Braum's Ice Cream and Dairy Stores; Clearview Cinemas; Wakefern Food Corporation, the merchandising and distribution arm of ShopRite supermarkets; and Taco Bell Corp. – are emblematic of the kind of merchants who have helped to make Visa Contactless cards the most rapidly adopted new payment technology in Visa’s history.

Visa Contactless technology enables customers to make purchases by simply holding their Visa Contactless cards near a secure reader at checkout instead of swiping them. The account information is securely transmitted by a tiny radio frequency chip embedded in the card.

Visa Contactless eliminates the signature requirement for most payments under $25, providing even greater convenience to customers making small ticket purchases. In addition, Visa Contactless maintains the level of security the industry has come to expect from Visa. A Visa card with the contactless feature never leaves the customer’s hand and can only be read at extremely close proximity to a contactless reader. In addition, the chip embedded in Visa Contactless cards generates data that is unique to each transaction, ensuring the same data cannot be used for fraudulent contactless transaction.

Testing Acceptance User

Business Acceptance Testing

Here is a link to an article on Business Acceptance Testing (BAT) at Tech Republic.
It covers the Acceptance Test Plan and identifies the key elements as:

• Customer responsibilities: Describe the activities the customer is responsible for and what others are responsible for. On some projects, the customer is responsible for all aspects of the test, including creating test scenarios, performing the tests, and validating the results. On other projects, the entire teams may assist in the various activities.
• Acceptance criteria: Before you begin the acceptance test, the team should know what criteria will be used to decide whether the system is acceptable or not. Does the system have to be perfect? You better hope not. But the acceptance criteria should define how the decision will be made. The customer may accept a system with certain minor types of errors remaining. But there may be other levels of errors that will render the system unacceptable. Part of the acceptance criteria may be to revalidate some of the other system tests. For instance, the customer may want to thoroughly test security, response times, functionality, etc. even if some of these tests were done as a part of system testing.
• Acceptance Test Workplan: Here, you define the activities associated with the acceptance test, when they will begin and end, who is responsible, and so on. In other words, you define the workplan for the test. Defining all this up front will help people understand what is expected of them, and they'll be aware of the timeframe and know when things are due. You should move all this information to the main project workplan.

Business Acceptance Testing

Quality movement: has it lost its way?

This post is slightly different from the usual posts on UAT in that it looks at a close relation: Quality Management. This is an extract from a report on the Quality movement by A. Kumar and puts a case to re-evaluate it:

We can have perfect systems and procedures for quality, but if the employees are not willing to follow, the whole system will fail to deliver. All companies in the services sector are victims of this syndrome. When the quality movement started, some shady agencies deceived their clients by promising that a quality assurance system, a quality certification and a quality assurance manager can ensure quality of the output. A QA system is as good or bad as the quality of those who implement it, and no company with sub-standard employees can provide standard services even if there is an ISO certified QA system and an expert QA Manager in place.

The most significant development in the rush for quality has been the unprecedented growth in the number of certification agencies. From a few international players the number has grown in hundreds the world over. The initial few had a bountiful harvest when the rush started, and that provided an ugly model for numerous "operators" to try their hand at a low-investment-high-return business opportunity. The simple fact that most of the new certification agencies have their principals in Europe and it was the European Union that triggered the quality juggernaut makes the whole exercise suspect.

The biggest beneficiary of this erroneous concept of quality assurance has been a set of professionals masquerading as quality assurance managers (QAM) in ISO-certified companies. They first descend on the victims (desperate for ISO certification) in the form of experts or consultants willing to assist in getting the initial certification. It goes to their credit that they do a useful job at this stage. In most companies, there will be severe shortage of expertise to document the procedures they follow in a systematic manner. This vacuum is easily filled by the so-called ISO experts and consultants. After marathon sessions with the employees, an acceptable and auditable quality system is set up. Then these quality consultants (sometimes in the form of a full-fledged company) spend months upon months conducting mock audits, feedbacks and corrections, until finally the whole system is ready for offering to an accredited external agency for certification. It is always up to these ISO consultants to conclude their deal by "arranging" a smooth audit and certification as per ISO norms.

The dubious and redundant aspect of quality management starts from this point. In order to maintain the certification and withstand the periodic surveillance audits of the external agency, most companies are too willing to accommodate these consultants or experts in the form of a quality assurance manager. Guidelines of ISO have made it easier for these "redundant" managers to report directly to the chief executive in order to keep "quality" as a high level and independent function in the organisation. And that makes it easier for these climbers to stay on forever. Most of the time, their work is reduced to arranging "facilities" for the external auditors and "taking care" of them during the audits. That both these efforts do not necessarily contribute to the quality of the host organization is a simple fact that misses the attention of the chief executives. In fact, they are counterproductive and retrograde. In the long run almost all such companies end up uneconomical, thanks to their misplaced overemphasis on quality rather than profit. Quality is meaningful only in a profit-making company and all the efforts for it must subordinate the ultimate objective of making profit.

Certification testing voting systems

From Vote trust USA

Adequately tested voting systems are a prerequisite for well run elections and to ensure public confidence in election results. When it is completed, the current process of testing voting systems will culminate in New York State’s four Election Commissioners deciding to approve, or “certify” those systems which meet the State’s regulations. Certification testing is ongoing and is proving to be a mixture of good and bad news.

Lacking required technical expertise of their own, the New York State Board of Elections has contracted out the work of machine certification testing to two contractors. The State Board provides nominal oversight, reviewing status reports and monitoring the schedule, but lacks the technical competence to meaningfully evaluate machine vendors and consultants. Unfortunately for New York State voters, the Board of Elections has consistently underestimated the complexity and scale of the task before them.

The principle contractor managing certification testing for the State Board of Elections is CIBER, Inc., one of three large testing companies which have close ties to the voting machine vendors. CIBER was responsible for the certification of several voting systems that were later shown to have defective software and defects, and were subsequently de-certified by several states. CIBER’s performance for New York State has thus far been poor, tending to favor machine vendors’ very loose interpretation of State requirements. Ciber has submitted inadequate drafts of Master Test and Security Test plans, and seems willing to tolerate poor testing practices in order to allow machines to pass tests they otherwise would not.

User acceptance testing definition

Testing and new procurement methods

From Australian IT

Corporations in Australia are radically reshaping the way they buy technology products and services, as they abandon the large-scale open tenders that have dominated purchasing. Australia's biggest computer users are instead opting to put technology suppliers through their paces in small, handpicked groups in an effort to shorten the procurement cycle and slash costs.

Government departments are getting in on the act too, with more using supplier panels.The changes could save public and private organisations hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars on every project they launch.

"The whole tendering process is expensive. It's quite time consuming both for companies looking to do business with a customer and for the customer itself," CSC Australia managing director Mike Shove says. "Rather than going to a large open tender, organisations are now doing their own due diligence and selecting two to five different players to engage with." The trend is evident throughout the private sector and is affecting everything from software procurement to multimillion-dollar outsourcing contracts, Shove says.

It is being used to pick winners for both single supplier and multi-sourcing deals and has been aided by a wave of consolidation that has swept through the computer and communications sector over the past decade.

While there isn't a confirmed link between the demand for independent advisers and more limited tendering, Ernst&Young technology and security risk services partner Chris Grant says the two practices can go hand in hand.

Companies may select a preferred supplier and then, with the assistant of an assurance adviser, test the proposed product or service before signing on the dotted line. "If you're looking for an accounting or finance-type solution then you can pretty much go to a shortlist of who the suppliers are, do a quick evaluation and then proceed to planning and a contract," Grant says.

Independent testing advice and services London UK

Eurofighter completes acceptance testing

From PR newswire

The Eurofighter ASTA team on Friday completed the Acceptance Testing of the latest software for the Aircrew Synthetic Training Aids (ASTA) with software load 1.0 standard in Manching. This new software will significantly increase the training capabilities of the Eurofighter Typhoon partner air forces especially in the field of mission simulation.

Acceptance testing service

Acceptance testing AJAX applications

Here is a summary of one of the sessions at the next AjaxWorld event in a couple of days time by David Hover who is author of the upcoming 'Acceptance Testing Rails' shortcut from Addison Wesley.

"When you need to test things that are not covered by the Rails testing framework (i.e. end-to-end AJAX), open source web testing toolkits are your best friend. While Selenium has merit and is particularly well-suited for cross-browser compatibility tests, this session will focus on putting Watir on Rails. Watir provides a clean API, simple setup, good integration into the Rails testing framework, and is supported in a growing number of browsers. Dave will demonstrate how to use Watir to test a Rails+AJAX application."

Acceptance and periodic testing seminar for elevator professionals

If you are in the elevator industry in Oklahoma then don't miss the Guymon Seminar, scheduled for Monday 18th September, from 1-3 p.m. at the Texas County Activity Center.

The seminar will address continuing education requirements, acceptance criteria for existing installations, incident reporting, investigation procedures, periodic testing requirements, and recognition of existing municipal elevator inspection programs.

For more info visit the Guymon Daily Herald

For information on services for setting effective acceptance criteria

Acceptance test plan template

If you are looking for a template for an acceptance test plan then try here. They have quite a few templates that you can purchase including the acceptance test plan (when I looked at it earlier today it was retailing for $9.99 USD)..

This site defines the document as:

"An Acceptance Test Plan describes the acceptance testing process, such as the features to be tested, pass/fail criteria, approach to testing, roles and responsibilities, resource requirements and schedules."

The contents of the acceptance test plan itself are identified as:

Acceptance Test Plan

1. Scope
2. Business Processes Testing
3. Testing Approach
4. Test Schedule
5. Problem Reporting
6. Resource Requirements
7. Test Environment
8. Post-Delivery Tests
9. Test Equipment
10. Software Requirements
11. Hardware Requirements
12. Test Identification
13. Acceptance Test Report
14. Corrective Action
15. Summary of Results
16. Conclusion

Does anyone know any other sites where you can doenload Acceptance test plan templates? Even better if they were free.

Acceptance testing and end-to-end testing

UAT outline description

From JISC Infonet

User Acceptance Testing is a key feature of projects to implement new systems or processes. It is the formal means by which we ensure that the new system or process does actually meet the essential user requirements. Each module to be implemented will be subject to one or more User Acceptance Tests (UAT) before being ‘signed off’ as meeting user needs. The following overview answers some of the main questions that have been asked about UATs.

A User Acceptance Test is:

• A chance to completely test business processes and software
• A scaled-down or condensed version of a system
• The final UAT for each system module is the last chance to perform the above in a test situation

The scope of each User Acceptance Test will vary depending on which business process is
being tested. In general however, tests will cover the following broad areas:

• A number of defined test cases using quality data to validate end-to-end business processes
• A comparison of actual test results against expected results
• A meeting/discussion forum to evaluate the process and facilitate issue resolution

Objectives of the User Acceptance Test are for a group of key users to:

• Validate system set-up for transactions and user access
• Confirm use of system in performing business processes
• Verify performance on business critical functions
• • Confirm integrity of converted and additional data, for example values that appear in a look-up table
• •Assess and sign off go-live readiness

User acceptance test UAT

Acceptance testing of new MMORPG

From MMORPG blog

"Developer Persistent Worlds was very pleased to announce that Carpe Diem, its newest fantasy MMORPG offering, has entered its Alpha Stage today.

Alpha Testing, otherwise known as Acceptance Testing, is wherein a new product in pre-release is tested internally before testing it with outside users. Says Persistent Worlds' Director of Technology and Operations, Phil White, "The Alpha test will allow us to ensure that all servers, support and game play changes are working properly before moving to the next stage."

The Alpha Test appears to be going well so far, and they expect to go to closed beta in about two weeks. Already being highly-anticipated, Carpe Diem already has received heaps of requests from gamers who want to take part in the game's Beta test. The positive response from the beta test survey also contributes to the optimistic outlook of the game's developer."

Alpha testing services for software applications

User acceptance features added to Mercury software testing tools

Mercury Interactive Corp. (although perhaps we should be calling them HP) have released a new version of its Business Process Testing QA (quality assurance) tool, with additional user-acceptance features.
In this article from PC Welt they desribe the new features added to BPT part of Quality Center which include tighter integration with the automated functional testing tool Winrunner. The part we are interested in is the certification step added to the software testing process whcih covers user acceptance.
It features a Web interface that business executives to try out a new aoftware application. This is meant to automate a step that is usually performed in an ad-hoc manner.

Endurance testing

Definition: UAT

This definition of User Acceptance Testing comes from Usability First:

"UAT; a method for determining how well users have adopted a new technology, especially in organizational settings. Users are typically interviewed to determine if and how they are using the technology and to understand what barriers to adoption may exist.

This sometimes refers to a "user testing" technique where users are asked to perform a scripted list of tasks with every step outlined and to comment on usability problems they encounter. However, this is more a quality assurance technique than user testing because scripted tasks don't reveal problems that users would encounter in actual use."

Software acceptance testing

Acceptance tests for extreme programming developments

Here's a page which describes acceptance testing for extreme programming developments. The tests are created from user stories (which equate to use cases).

"Quality assurance (QA) is an essential part of the XP process. On some projects QA is done by a separate group, while on others QA will be an integrated into the development team itself. In either case XP requires development to have much closer relationship with QA.
Acceptance tests should be automated so they can be run often. The acceptance test score is published to the team. It is the team's responsibility to schedule time each iteration to fix any failed tests.
The name acceptance tests was changed from functional tests. This better reflects the intent, which is to guarantee that a customers requirements have been met and the system is acceptable."

Independent acceptance testing services for agile developments

User Acceptance Testing key deliverables

An article here which attempts to explain the process of user acceptance testing. It concludes by listing the key deliverables of UAT as:

"1) The Test Plan- This outlines the Testing Strategy

2) The UAT Test cases – The Test cases help the team to effectively test the application

3) The Test Log – This is a log of all the test cases executed and the actual results.

4) User Sign Off – This indicates that the customer finds the product delivered to their satisfaction"

User Acceptance Testing Is Hardly Testing

Provactively entitled blog post here. At first glance it looks like something belittling user acceptance testing.

"Quality assurance personnel use performance and reliability testing to verify service levels of the system as a whole. While each of these techniques serves a unique purpose on the project, they also share a common goal - find defects. However, this is something your user acceptance tests should never do."

However, when you read the well written item, it is actually a plea to improve testing early in the lifecycle:

"Numerous studies have shown that fixing defects found late in a delivery cycle can carry an extremely high cost. If serious problems are found during User Acceptance Testing (or UAT), they can easily translate into significant budget overruns, slips of the schedule, or even project cancellation. Issues must be identified and addressed as early as possible. By the time UAT rolls around, there should be nothing major left to uncover. User acceptance testing should be little more than a pat on the back of your development team for a job well done."

I like the idea of UAT being a pat on the back very much.

User acceptance test standards

A user acceptance testing standard for application development (including templates for the creation of a user acceptance test plan) can be found here.

The contents of the document are:

1. Introduction
1.1 Audience
1.2 Purpose
1.3 Assumptions
1.4 Standard

2. User acceptance test standards
2.1 Overview
2.2 New System Test
2.3 Regression Test
2.4 Limited Testing
2.4.1 Form-Based Testing
2.4.2 Business Process Testing
2.4.3 Report Testing

3. Assessing the test types for a test plan
3.1 Overview
3.2 Assessing the Test Type Required

4. Creating a user acceptance test plan
4.1 Test Instructions
4.2 Form-Based Test Scripts
4.3 User Security Matrix
4.4 Business Process Test Scripts
4.5 Report Test Scripts
4.6 Defect Tracking Form
4.7 Defect Tracking Log

5. Conclusion

And the conclusion is:

"The test scripts created for a new system, for regression testing or for limited testing should be recycled throughout the application 's life. By editing existing test scripts the User Acceptance Test Planning process can save time and money, as well as maintain the test quality, as key requirement information will be re-used."


Acceptance test planning support

Non recovery V. Disaster Recovery

Interesting news story from Zdnet in Australia

"The NSW Department of Primary Industries (NSW DPI) has conceded its technology consolidation project is still suffering delays due partly to an incident which saw much of the computer equipment in its facility in regional NSW "slow-baked" in searing temperatures.

Warwick Lill, host systems manager, NSW DPI, said a faulty fire detection system at the start of the year had contributed to the agency's data centre reference implementation (DCRI) project, an 18-month long undertaking, running several months behind schedule.

The problem occurred at NSW DPI's site at Maitland in the Hunter Valley.

"At about 10 minutes to midnight on New Years Eve there was a false alarm in the fire detection system in Maitland, which shut down the air conditioning in the computer room without shutting down the computers," Lill told attendees at Gartner's data centre conference in Sydney.

The state experienced record temperatures on new year's day.

"This wasn't detected until about 11 o'clock in the morning," he said.

"By that time the temperature inside the computer room was up around 70 degrees or something.

"That sort of slow-baked all of the equipment that was in the room, and we're in essence still recovering from that one. So work at the Maitland site in regards to this project has come to a stop until we manage to fix that."

The DCRI project aims to consolidate a large swathe of information technology operations inherited from the NSW DPI's predecessor agencies to sites in Maitland and Orange under moves to generate efficiencies and cut costs. The NSW government created the DPI in July 2004 through the amalgamation of Mineral Resources NSW, NSW Agriculture, NSW Fisheries and State Forests NSW.

"We had too many IT managers, we had too many systems, we had too many ways of doing things," said Lill.

The DCRI project has required extensive planning and preparation in areas such as disaster recovery and system layout.

"We wanted to setup a mutual failover between those two sites, that's the basis of our disaster recovery plan," said Lill.

"We wanted to rationalise the system landscape that we had, so we had dedicated systems for production, user acceptance testing, development, DR [disaster recovery] and so on."

NSW DPI has also acquired a range of hardware and software for the project, primarily from services partner Sun.

"What we've put in, in order of implementation, was a management cluster with dedicated storage at each of our two major sites."

This project was not without its problems, however.

"We moved a little too quickly from the planning phase into the implementation phase, and that combined with the fact that we didn't know quite as much about clustering as we might've needed to do, we didn't quite get the design for the original management cluster right.

"It took a period of time to recognise that and to agree to redo it, so that's put us behind by about three months."

Also implemented were new tape libraries at both sites, and Sun's C2MS (e-mail archiving), SAM-FS (archive management) and Management Centre (system management) software.

The choice of EMC Legato NetWorker as enterprise backup product, however, had been another contributor to delays in the project.

"We've found that the Legato backup software, the database agents for Legato backup software, are not certified for operation in Solaris 10 containers. So at the moment we can't back up our databases if we move them to the application cluster.

"So we're looking forward to a solution to that one in the reasonably near future," he said.

Lill described the work of services partner Sun as "terrific," but conceded there had been early problems in the relationship between the two.

"We bought a design I believe ... whereas Sun sold us a set of hardware and software and professional services during the implementation.

"Initially at least there was a bit of a disconnect between those two, but through communication and influencing and so on we've managed to bring things pretty well together.

"If I was doing it again I think I'd spend more time in the contract negotiation stage looking at the very fine detail of what was proposed."

Lill said he was confident the project would be completed and work well."

Interesting that if he was doing it again the key thing he'd concentrate on is the specification of what he was getting. Having an effective acceptance process and clear acceptance criteria is a key step in getting what you expect when you expect it.

Acceptance criteria and testing

Acceptance testing article

Here is an article on acceptance testing and its role in allowing customers to ensure that the system meets their business requirements.

A couple of useful passages:

"In fact, depending on how your other tests were performed, this final test may not always be necessary. If the customers and users participated in system tests, such as requirements testing and usability testing, they may not need to perform a formal acceptance test. However, this additional test will probably be required for the customer to give final approval for the system."

Combining user acceptance testing with other testing activities saves time and money.

"The acceptance test is the last opportunity customers have to make sure that the system is what they asked for. When this final test is complete, the team expects that the customer will formally approve the system or point out any problems that still need to be resolved. Therefore, unlike all the other tests performed so far, acceptance testing is the customers' responsibility. Of course, unless the customers are very savvy in testing techniques, they will still need the participation of the IT team."

Using specialist software testing support ensures your testing is effective and efficient. Given that this is the final test it needs to be effective.

User acceptance testing term

This definition of user acecptance testing comes from SearchSMB.com:

In software development, user acceptance testing (UAT) - also called beta testing, application testing, and end user testing - is a phase of software development in which the software is tested in the "real world" by the intended audience. UAT can be done by in-house testing in which volunteers or paid test subjects use the software or, more typically for widely-distributed software, by making the test version available for downloading and free trial over the Web. The experiences of the early users are forwarded back to the developers who make final changes before releasing the software commercially.

UAT services

User acceptance testing

This blog is about User Acceptance Testing (aka UAT or just simply acceptance testing). For this first post I will simply offer the Wikipedia defintion:

User Acceptance Testing (UAT) is a process to obtain confirmation by a Subject Matter Expert (SME), preferably the owner or client of the object under test, through trial or review, that the modification or addition meets mutually agreed-upon requirements. In software development, UAT is one of the final stages of a project and will often occur before a client or customer accepts a new system.



User acceptance testing services