Hays Specialist Recruitment implemented a successful selective adoption strategy with the support of PeopleSoft Test Framework

Background

Hays Specialist Recruitment is a global specialist staffing company that commenced its PeopleSoft journey back in 2008. Hays has a complex, heavily customized PeopleSoft suite with 16 modules across the five pillars of FSCM, HCM, CRM, ELM, and Interaction Hub.

In 2015 Hays upgraded their estate to 9.2 and have evolved their selective adoption strategy through the stages of change avoidance through to an IT led maintenance program to a collaborative business/IT “Model Office” approach that is delivering real business benefits through initiatives including fluid, WorkCenters, dashboards, mobile approvals, and guided self-service.

The challenge

Having delivered three major PeopleSoft programs between 2008 and 2015, Hays have adopted an agile/sprint-based methodology in 2017 to deliver all maintenance and new features projects. This change has been extremely well received by the Hays user community as it addresses three key strategic challenges – keeping the application in support, keeping it secure, and adopting a long-term sustainable model.

This evolution from a large project every three years to an agile delivery mechanism identified a major business concern: How could we cope with the increased volume of business testing? So, Hays looked to the automated testing solution of PeopleSoft Test Framework, as PTF looked like the tool that could address our objectives of being:

• Repeatable.
• Low maintenance.
• Capable of running complex test cases.
• Able to build business confidence.
• Capable of significantly reducing the volume of manual business testing.

The solution

Hays initially commissioned a pilot to create a PTF use case around one of their most complex manual testing scenarios – a retro transaction within PeopleSoft FSCM. The business SME worked collaboratively with the IT team to design and execute the test case and the result was extremely positive! Not only was the test a success, but there was compelling feedback from the business team that the automated test would significantly reduce both the manual testing effort as well as improve the elapsed time required for completion of business acceptance testing.

With the full approval of the senior finance stakeholders, Hays commenced a full phased implementation of PeopleSoft Test Framework. Phase 1 of the rollout was challenged to look at an area of finance that is both highly specialized and highly manual. If successful, the business benefits were broad—not just saving time and money from a testing perspective, but also providing real career development opportunities for business users. The finance area chosen for Phase 1 was that of accounts receivable, billing, paybill and retros. These are areas of the business that meant they had to deploy their most experienced users to undertake highly specialized repetitive manual tests—not an area of their responsibilities that the staff involved found personally rewarding.

The Hays team needed to have the PTF tests available that were going to be used for their major maintenance program scheduled to commence in January 2018. This major program will bring their FSCM and HCM products up to the latest image. To achieve this, Hays targeted delivery of the Phase 1 scripts for parallel running during their minor maintenance program that will be completed in the second half of 2017.

The results

Hays undertook a detailed analysis of the documented manual test cases and identified 40% of the cases that were suitable for automation within AR, billing, paybill, and retros. These test cases were selected on the basis of the data being completely contained within PeopleSoft (or underlying tables) and having no dependency on external systems.

This analysis also identified that PTF could be used to resolve one of the more mundane and laborious elements of project testing—that of loading test data. The design of their Hays PTF solution allows for the automated population of test data across all the major test scenarios.

A project team consisting of a senior architect, an experienced functional analyst, and two developers have been working in defined four weekly sprints to create 40 consolidated shell tests, which comprise over 270 individual tests. Each shell test represents a complete business process. These test cases have been deployed to the system integration test (SIT) environment and have been run in parallel with the manual SIT tests that have been undertaken by the IT team.

These tests—both negative and positive—have proved to be highly successful. Typical results have indicated significant savings in both time and duration:

• PO tracking UAT test window three days (two experienced business SMEs)
• PTF PO tracking test run time 8-10 hours

The business users that have been working with the IT team have also indicated that the PTF solution is increasing their confidence of the project that has been delivered.

PeopleSoft Test Framework has been a tremendous success and allowed Hays to fully execute on their selective adoption strategy.