Scenario
You are the administrator in a company with 100 employees that sells products through a network of regional sales employees.
You use an internal application “EasyDrive” within your local area network (LAN) to record and bill traveling expenses. EasyDrive currently runs in version 2.3.
Approximately 30 regional sales employees use EasyDrive to record their traveling expenses on a daily/weekly basis. An interface to your existing ERP system enables EasyDrive to pass on the data.
The vendor of EasyDrive recently shipped an update to version 3.0. Due to your current maintenance contract, your company receives the update free of charge.
Requirements
You want to roll-out the update and ensure that this happens as seamlessly as possible.
Since you want to ensure that the new Version of EasyDrive runs correctly on all installed workstations, you have to create a test environment (as hardware or as virtual machines), describe test cases and perform tests.
The protocols of the tests performed will help you to decide whether EasyDrive runs as expected and can be deployed into a live business environment.
Methods to achieve the task
You create a plan:
- Which tests have to be performed?
- Who are the testing users and who are the test managers?
You do these planning steps directly within Zeta Test by creating test cases and test plans. Since all employees use the same type of PC hardware and operating system, you define a single test environment that corresponds to the workstation PC of an employee.
After that you let your administrator set up and configure the appropriate hardware test environment (or indeed as a virtual machine).
You receive the new version 3.0 of EasyDrive from the vendor and deploy it into your test environment.
The testing users perform the tests that you defined previously. If errors occur during these tests (i.e. tests are failed), a test manager generates a report with all failed tests at the end of a test run and forwards these errors to the vendor of EasyDrive.
The vendor of EasyDrive corrects the errors, provides you with a new version that you again deploy into your test environment. After that the testing users perform all tests again.
This workflow is repeated until you as the project manager decide (by looking at the reports generated by Zeta Test) that the new version of EasyDrive can be deployed into a live business environment.
Since EasyDrive is a high-availability application, you have to perform all tests in the live production environment again, to ensure that the application behaves as expected there too. Therefore, the testing users create copies of the test plans for the test environment and perform the tests in the live environment.
If tests in the live environment fail, a rollback of the deployment is implemented and the previous version is restored. You inform the vendor of EasyDrive and the tests start again in the test environment.
If everything then works correctly in the live environment, the tests are finished. For revision purposes, you can generate reports of the individual test runs at any time.
Benefits
Due to using Zeta Test, all functions and behaviors of the new applications were extensively tested.
You can support the go-live of the application with a smaller team then you would have done without Zeta Test because the feedback from the users will be less than ever.
Overall, your users will have high levels of satisfaction with the software.