Test Your Business Workflows
To make the most of the release preview period, you should identify, document, and test the key business workflows in your production account. Testing your critical workflows and reports, and reporting any issues you encounter is the most important aspect of release preview. Compile a list of the critical task paths your employees follow to get their jobs done and create a document for each process.
You should use a spreadsheet application and create a separate worksheet for each common daily task. Use this spreadsheet as your checklist during testing. Although this is not required, it a may help you be more efficient and organized during future release preview testing.
Download the Release Preview Test Plan Template to create a test plan for each of your business workflows. This Microsoft Excel worksheet includes a testing matrix, workflow worksheets, and examples. After you have downloaded the file, modify it to suit your testing needs.
Click the following link to download the template: ReleasePreviewTestPlan_Template.xls.
At minimum, each business workflow documented should contain the following components:
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Business Workflow Name – Provide a unique name.
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Role – Specify the role to use when testing the process.
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Email – Specify the email address to use for testing.
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Steps – Provide the detailed navigation required to accomplish the desired task.
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Results – List expected results.
Whenever possible, try to incorporate users with different roles when testing your business workflows (Finance, Project Manager, Resource Manager, Consultant or End User, for example), rather than testing only as an account administrator. If it is impossible to procure those resources for testing, you can use the Proxy/Log-in as feature to test ‘as them’. You may find critical defects that impact specific roles but do not impact account administrators.
Suggested Areas for Testing
Critical workflows depend on your specific business requirements. The following list is provided for reference only. Some of the following areas may not be applicable to your account and you may have critical workflows that are not included in this list.
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Timesheet entry
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Expense entry
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Approvals (approve time, expense, invoices, and other transactions set up for approvals on your account)
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Billing and invoicing (run billing for a project, create an invoice)
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Creating and updating bookings or staffings
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Viewing, creating and updating bookings or staffings on the chart, worksheet, or planner.
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Creating and updating project plans, tasks and task assignments
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Running charge and revenue projections manually. Make sure they are generated properly using a report – See Test Critical Reports.
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User event scripts on any form (if you are using the OpenAir user scripting platform).