This blog was written by Ade Odumosu – Head Of Client Relations at Infuse.
Universities spend a lot of time throughout the year getting ready for the new academic year. Systems are upgraded, new functionality goes in, integrations change and teams are working across student records, CRM, finance, timetabling, admissions and other systems to make sure everything is ready.
Then September comes around and that’s when everything gets properly tested in the real world.
Suddenly you’ve got thousands of students enrolling, registering, checking timetables, making payments and accessing different systems, often at the same time.
For me, this is where there can sometimes be a difference between a system being live and actually being ready.
You can have individual systems that have been tested and signed off, but that doesn’t always mean the full journey is going to work as expected.
A student doesn’t really care whether the problem is with the student records system, CRM, an integration or a third-party supplier. From their point of view, they can’t enrol, their timetable isn’t showing, a payment hasn’t gone through or something else isn’t working as they expected.
What might be a relatively small technical issue can then quickly become a much bigger problem for the university, with more calls into support teams, manual workarounds and additional pressure on teams at what is already one of the busiest times of the year.
Testing the whole journey
One thing I’ve seen from working with different universities is just how connected everything now is.
Student records, CRM, finance, VLE, timetabling, attendance, identity management and numerous other systems and integrations all need to work together.
That’s why I think end-to-end testing is becoming more important.
It’s not just about whether each individual system works. It’s whether a student can go through the complete journey and everything that needs to happen across the different systems happens correctly.
Testing also needs to be realistic. What happens when thousands of people are using the systems? Is the right data moving between them? What happens when something fails? Are the key student and staff journeys covered?
There will always be issues. You can’t test absolutely everything and no amount of testing is going to remove all risk.
But there’s a big difference between dealing with a few unexpected issues and finding out in September that a key student journey doesn’t work properly.
Making things easier next time
I also think universities should be looking at what happens after September.
Once things have settled down, it’s worth looking back at what actually happened. Where were most of the issues? What caused the most support calls? Which processes needed manual workarounds? Which integrations caused problems? And which areas took the most effort to test?
That information can then help decide what needs to change before the next academic year.
This is also where test automation can help. If teams are manually running the same important tests every time there’s an upgrade, patch or release, there is an opportunity to automate some of that and get quicker feedback without constantly asking people to repeat the same work.
We’ve seen this first-hand at De Montfort University, where Infuse helped automate key end-to-end Student Lifecycle journeys, giving the team a way to quickly check whether changes across their environment had impacted core processes.
The DMU case study goes into more detail on what they did and the impact automation had on the amount of manual testing required.
We’ve also looked at some of the wider challenges around testing in Higher Education in our Tested to the Limit white paper, including lessons we’ve seen across implementations, upgrades and transformation programmes.
For me, the aim shouldn’t just be getting systems live for September.
Universities spend a huge amount of time getting ready for the new academic year. Testing should give them confidence that when students and staff actually arrive and start using everything, the experience they’ve spent all year preparing for works as expected.
At Infuse, we’ve supported a number of universities with testing across implementations, upgrades and wider transformation programmes. If this September has highlighted areas of your testing that could have gone better, or things you don’t want to be dealing with again next year, now is probably a good time to start the conversation.
Get in touch and we’d be happy to share some of what we’ve seen work across the sector.