Written by: STEVE BECK, Automation Architect, Inspired Testing
If you’ve been using Thomson Reuters Enterprise software as your Business Management Software of choice to handle all your billing and invoicing-related workflows, you’re not alone. But with the release of Thomson Reuters Elite 3E and the move to an Angular-based application, many companies are wanting to migrate to the new platform.
This, however, is not always a straightforward process and could potentially expose your company to data risks. For example, if a bill is incorrectly generated, you could undercharge one of your clients and therefore lose money, or overcharge and risk your reputation while having to issue credit notes.
So how do you go about successfully migrating all of your historical and existing data without introducing errors in 3E?
Understanding the risks
From a testing perspective, one of the first things you need to do is understand the risks. Once you know what you’re looking for, you can create formalised Test Cases and automate them for regression purposes.
For example, if your highest priority risk was related to Rates, you could automate the Time Entry workflow on Elite 3E. This can be done relatively quickly and takes only a few minutes to run end-to-end.
You should also investigate the scope of the data you need for testing. For example, in a business with thousands of Timekeepers (and even more Matter numbers), the number of required tests to cover Rates and Exceptions climbs into the millions.
In this case a quick front-end automation solution is not plausible without parallel execution, otherwise you’d be facing a testing cycle of over 1,500 days of non-stop execution to complete UAT, excluding automating Enterprise.
Executing the strategy
The strategy we would use to mitigate the above conditions is twofold: automate Elite 3E as quickly as possible and replicate any processes on the previous application (eg. Enterprise) to use the outputs as a test oracle for Elite 3E tests.
Using Transaction Services, for example, you can skip the front end, allowing you to blitz through the workflows in seconds rather than minutes. In the case of a Rates test, use a combination of Matters and Timekeepers to post a time entry of a single hour on both Elite and Enterprise via their respective Transaction Services.
Once this is done, simply search the Elite and Enterprise databases for the data you created and then compare it on a 1:1 validation. Doing so you can run a full test case every four to six seconds, and execute more than a million tests every week.
With large amounts of data involved in an Enterprise to 3E migration, it becomes impossible to test all the possible combinations of data manually. When tested manually the chance of finding any errors is exactly that – chance.
Automation allows us to find these needles in the data haystack, and by finding and resolving them, we avoid any scenarios that would disenfranchise the business or its clients.