Our client is one of the world’s oldest educational establishments. It has 18,000 students from all corners of the world, over 9,000 staff, 31 colleges and 150 departments, faculties and other institutions. It also has 75 libraries. The libraries each have teams for acquiring new books, cataloguing, loans and recalling books.

The university is in the process of replacing its library management system (LMS). This is a major project with considerable risks to mitigate through testing. A large part of the testing risk centres around data migration, as data from the university’s nine legacy databases must be de-duplicated, merged and loaded into a single database.

The university library was looking to source testing and quality assurance (QA) expertise to complement its internal resources.
The university library needed to work with a partner who could develop a testing strategy to ensure the LMS system was fit for purpose. We were selected for our QA expertise and experience working with higher education establishments.

Our approach had two distinct areas. The first was the development of the test strategy, including a test approach, for the LMS replacement project. This included a test schedule, a requirements traceability matrix and test report templates. We were also responsible for the User Acceptance Testing (UAT) planning and design. The team facilitated a set of risk workshops for the wider library community to plan and define their UAT. The idea was that the workshops would elicit the main areas for the libraries to test the new LMS.

Risk mitigation: We developed a strategic, best practice test approach to ensure risks could be mitigated to enable the transition to the new LMS to be as seamless as possible.

Objectives met: The traceability of the solution against the original business case ensured the acceptance of the solution could be measured against what was required.

Doing it for themselves: Our coordination and support to assist UAT ensured that users are now empowered to take ownership of testing the new system.