Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The selection of transactions to be recorded should be limited to those of primary
interest for later analysis. Ancillary function calls such as “show date”, “return to
main menu” and others should be skipped.
7.2.4.4 Acceptance of Customising
Very similar to functional acceptance tests a correct customising can only be
verified through appropriate test cases. These should be defined in consultation
with and executed by the business end users. Concerning textual adjustments only,
visual inspections suffice. Default menu paths have to be run through and log files
triggered. More effort has to be invested when accepting mapping tables. In these
cases a deeper analysis of error protocols is necessary to be able to distinguish
customising errors from other interface malfunctions.
Adjustments resulting from technical customising sometimes can prove their
validity only under full productive operation (configuration parameters); otherwise
one has to have a completely mirrored system for bulk tests available. But again
also in this case the precise addressing of destination systems can only be checked
under real conditions.
Acceptance procedures for customising generally follow the same lines as usual
with corresponding final documentation.
7.2.4.5 Handing Over
From the discussion above it follows that customising can be an extensive piece of
work. Therefore one has to make sure to invest this effort only once. Since it has to
be done in any case on the test system this will at the same time serve as a basis for
the future production configuration. Procedures follow this line:
1. Build of test system (empty data base)
2. Technical customising
3. Business related customising
4. Data upload
5. Dump
6. Acceptance
7. Software amendments
8. Build of productive system (empty data base)
9. Upload dump
10. Clearance for production.
It is quite possible that certain elements of the technical customising are inde-
pendent of the dump or only possible after data upload. This depends on the
architecture of the application. In this respect the sequence discussed above has
to be interpreted as being ideal.
