Published December 01, 2022 by Workday Project Team

Workday Finance Unit Testing Continues

Since early this fall, the Bowdoin Finance implementation team has been hard at work doing Unit Testing. What does that mean, exactly, and how does it fit into an implementation project?

Testing on a project like this goes through a few testing phases: Smoke Testing, Unit Testing, End to End Testing, and User Acceptance Testing.

Smoke Testing essentially makes sure important features are working and there are no showstopping issues with the system build.
Unit Testing means that people are testing individual portions of processes to ensure that single steps function as intended.
End to End testing is where testers actually try to take a process from start to finish to see if the results are what we hoped to see.
User Acceptance Testing is where we take those refined and tested processes and have real-world users give their normal processes a try in this testing environment.

The Finance team is currently deep in Unit Testing, with about one more month to go before the end of this Unit Testing phase. Outside their weekly consultant meetings, the Finance team is trying out their processes in our testing environment. The team is working from a list of tests that Alchemy provided, with additions from the Bowdoin team to account for individualized and Bowdoin-specific processes. If they find defects, the team is logging them in a specialized Smartsheet that the consultant can review and correct, which allows the Bowdoin team member to re-test that process. Then, in their weekly meeting with their Alchemy consultant, the Bowdoin tester can discuss any issues they've encountered with their tests or to ask any questions that have come up in their testing. The Bowdoin tester and their consultant go over items brought by Bowdoin or items brought by the consultant, establish a plan for the next week, and then the testing continues for another week.

Unit Testing will continue until the end of Bowdoin's holiday break, at which point we will move on to a new tenant build for End to End testing. We'll cover this in January, so stay tuned!