As you would expect, my work isn’t just writing blogs about training courses that you all will hopefully like – my usual work is consulting in the area of test automation. This last year presented a huge learning curve to me. One year ago I could only dream about test automation and consulting. Now it is my daily routine. I quickly learned the skills and was thrown straight into a huge project within a bank. One year late I’m quite proud of my successes and I want you to be part of what happened.
A Consultant’s day starts early traveling to the customer.
Two minutes into this new adventure, my first project was introduced to me: Forex Exchange. As you would expect, it is all about the exchange of money and you can’t imagine how many possibilities there are! I created 272 test cases within 42 days. After this huge success and quite fast progress I had smaller things to cover.
A Backup via TCShell was implemented, along with 8 small test cases and test case design. Then I created and designed 34 test cases concentrating on Asset Custodian Rule.
To see something other than a DotNet based Core Bank system, I did a proof of concept with a contact tool and implemented test cases with an online Booking software, all in Html and powered by the TBox Engine.
Most of the time I reworked and added new test cases to the existing ones, like the European Union Savings Directive or Stock Exchange. Test data management was implemented in some parts and some older parts were changed to newer ones. The test data management connection was also improved and unified. Some changes were done through the whole portfolio, which needed huge resources (testing 1300 test cases!!).
Just to add some information at this point: The customer’s portfolio runs in 3 stages. First is asset creation, then object generation, and lastly test cases. The first and second parts together need about 50 hours to complete.
Compliance (34 test cases), Profits (12 test cases), Deliveries (33 test cases), and many uncalculated test cases supporting other projects were created within a test case design.
All existing payment test cases (about 200, with 58 new ones) were updated to the new payments clearing and settlement messaging format. To compare PDF’s, I added 113 test cases and about 32 reconciliation test cases.
I was also confronted with some problems. One was the usage of the 32bit Tosca Commander (which was needed because of Oracle and Classic DB Engine/ Classic TDM Engine). With the 32bit Commander you can’t take subsets that are bigger than the maximum addressable memory. Mixed Execution (with TDM) is another problem, because you have to switch between a 32bit and a 64bit driver, which is impossible. But I could manage it all in an appropriate way.
And ends sometimes in this beautiful Vienna sunset.
To sum it up, I can say it was a good year. About 600 End to End test cases were created, most of them needing test case design. They all got test data management and Execution Lists. Within this project risk coverage optimization was not the project focus (we were reporting on the number of test cases given to me by the customer), but the follow up project is already planned to start with a risk based testing approach.
In the end however, the only thing which matters is the satisfaction of the customer – which in this case, is very good.