Building, Testing, and Rolling Out the Application

Follow these key steps:

Build Your Application

Start by building the foundation—your company’s accounts and organizational structure. Next, add scenarios to support your internal processes, such as Plan, Actual, and Forecast. Add the variance members you report, such as Actual vs. Plan.

Create forms that will be used to collect data from your users and to perform reviews, analysis, and reporting. To support your business logic, you can leverage Calculation Manager to build your calculations. You can also create reports and apply access permissions before rolling out your application to users.

For help with this task, first review the topics in this guide. After that, you can follow the procedures in Creating a Planning Application in Administering Planning.

Test

Testing is a critical step in application development. All of the calculations, access permissions, and reports must be tested to ensure that they work appropriately.

Plan Unit Testing

Unit testing is the first step of formalized testing, and is the main building block of the test environment. Unit testing involves testing each functional area of the application as a separate unit to ensure that it performs as expected.

For example, a test could confirm that a data load executes to completion without errors. Other tests could confirm that forms and reports are accessible, calculations complete, and so on. Tests should also confirm that calculation logic and math works correctly.

The person that builds or configures the application usually conducts unit testing.

Plan System Testing

System testing validates that the system operates without error and provides the required functionality. The main emphasis is to test the way the application has been configured and to look at how the team constructed the business processes and reports.

System testing focuses on testing the entire system, including unique parameter configuration, all functions that will be used, and any enhancements. System testing also looks beyond the software, and validates the effectiveness of manual procedures, forms and controls. It is a complete set of formal functional tests covering all aspects of functionality within the system being built.

This type of test is often combined with:

Security Tests: Tests that the system security and database security is appropriate for the overall system and each specific user.
Integration Tests: Tests the overall business solution, including the passage of data to and from other integrated systems. This confirms that the functionality remains valid when all aspects of the system have been combined.
User Acceptance Tests: Users validate that the system operates correctly and meets requirements. If users are not involved in formal system testing or they request specific tests, there may be a need for further acceptance tests. However, in most cases, this type of testing is done as part of System and Integration Tests, provided that users recognize these tests as adequate for acceptance purposes.
Full System Test: The sequence of calculations should be identified and no calculation, run in or out of sequence, should adversely impact another calc result (or anything else).

Load Test: Before testing with real users, conduct a load test to ensure that the application can perform under the expected user load. Load testing should be done with realistic and representative data. The performance and load testing needs the cube to be full, and the data must represent the likely sparse combination of data intersections. A very good data set is critical to a success testing effort.

Production Regression Testing

Oracle recommends that you build regression testing. You can also request automated regression testing through the Regression Testing Program. For details, see Requesting Automated Regression Testing in Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud Operations Guide.

Roll Out

During rollout, you can train end users on the system, and show them how to navigate and use functionality.

As a best practice, document your system to enable others to take over administration as necessary.

Training

All users of the system should be trained on the application. Users need to learn how to navigate comfortably around the application and understand the tasks assigned to them. Training should include logging into the application, navigating through task lists, entering data, running rules, using Oracle Smart View for Office, and using tools within the application. Training is typically the user’s first exposure to the application, and a well planned and executed training session helps make a good first impression.

Document System and Administrative Information

After building your application, it is recommended that you create system and administrative documentation for the application.

Best practices:

Create this documentation at the end of the build process when the information is fresh.
Include information such as the sources of data, the application structure, how calculations work, and what maintenance is required for the application.
List maintenance tasks broken down into timeframes, such as monthly and annual maintenance. This makes it possible for someone else to take over the system later if necessary. Examples include updating substitution variables, time horizons, and resetting historical data.

Enable the Application for Users

To enable the application for end users, open up the system.

If you are using process management, start approval units to enable the approvals process. After it is started, it moves from one reviewer to another until the process is complete as described in Managing Approvals in Administering Planning.