Finance End to End Testing

For the last few weeks, our Alchemy team has been hard at work constructing a new tenant - or testing environment - to serve as our updated space to conduct our End to End testing. As we posted in December, End to End testing is the phase where our Bowdoin teams try to complete full processes from start to finish. 

The testing environment, or tenant, first goes through a process called Data Validation, where the Bowdoin finance and IT teams compare our Unit Testing tenant to our newly-built End to End tenant and make sure that all of the important data, business processes (workflows), security assignments, reports, integrations, and more are in place and correct. This is very time consuming and very important, because if the system isn't set up correctly no tests are going to be a good use of anyone's time! 

Interestingly, this process can take different amounts of times for different workstreams, which is implementation-speak for individual areas of functionality that have their own consultants and their own weekly meetings. Banking is a workstream, Procurement and Suppliers is a workstream, Grants is a workstream, Financial Accounting is a workstream, and so on. Some of these workstreams are more streamlined than others, or don't have to worry about integrations or other more complicated connections, and so were able to get through data validation and begin end to end testing relatively quickly. Other areas are vast and complicated, and include a lot of connections and a lot of business processes, so their data validation takes longer and requires a lot more back and forth with the Alchemy team to make sure everything is correct. And because we are already live on Workday, it isn't a matter of Alchemy being able to copy+paste one Bowdoin environment into the next, because we need to be sure that things we are building in implementation won't inadvertently interfere with what we have actively happening in our live environment where people are running payroll and managing benefits!

At this point, near the end of January, end to end tests are rolling along. This is following a similar process as our unit tests, where the Bowdoin team is working from a Smartsheet of testing scenarios and working with consultants on fixes and questions. Where this work gets more complicated is that now, a process that may start with the Bursar then heads to the cashier and finally to bank reconciliation for completion. Where unit testing could be handled all by one individual, end to end testing requires members of the Finance implementation to do testing in collaboration with each other to try to mimic how these processes will route and flow in the real world. To accomplish this, the Controller's Office has set aside 3-5pm every day to try to work on their testing and help move processes from start to finish.