Understanding Change Impacts

In the course of customizations and upgrades, changes are made to, among other elements, application menus, components, pages, records, and fields. Tests that were developed prior to these changes may fail when executed against the new application. For instance, if a field is deleted, moved to another page, or renamed, any step that references that field will fail. Test developers must identify and update every step in each test that is affected by the change.

One way to identify the effects on tests is to run each test against the new application and note where the test fails. This manual process is time-consuming, expensive, and prone to errors. It also fails to identify those areas in the new application that are not covered by existing tests.

Because PeopleSoft Test Framework (PTF) test assets are PeopleTools metadata and because PTF tests incorporate references to PeopleTools metadata—that is, menus, components, pages, records, and fields—PTF is able to automate the process of correlating metadata changes with existing tests.

PTF delivers two tools that help test developers to determine the effect of changes:

• Test maintenance reports

  A test maintenance report correlates PeopleTools compare report data with PTF test metadata to identify certain changes to menus, components, pages, records, and fields that may impact the PTF tests.

• Test coverage reports

  A test coverage report correlates PeopleTools project data with PTF test metadata to identify menus, components, pages, records, and fields that are referenced in PTF tests.

  When used in conjunction with Usage Monitor, test coverage correlations can be extended to include information on additional managed objects.

  A test coverage report identifies which objects included in the change project are referenced by which PTF test. Any object included in the change project that is not referenced in the PTF test metadata appears in the report identified as a coverage gap.