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stage, but DSA deferred cutover discussions until DSA management could see the
new system in action. One of the customer relationship benefi ts of including DSA in
the data entry screen tests is to gain credibility that the new system could replace the
old system. With the DSA management fully “on board,” a meeting is held around
week 6 to defi ne the cutover plans.
During the static testing of use case-05: DSA certifi cate record searching, one
of the testers asks the question, “When and how should we transfer the current fi le
cabinets of completion certifi cates to the new computer system for historical search-
ing?” This question leads to a lively discussion. As long as there are manual records
to search, DSA incurs the overhead of staff to search them and 5 years worth of fi le
cabinet space to store them. With the new data entry process fi ve times faster than
the old typing process, the current data entry staff should be able to fi nish the weekly
class roster workload and have some time to spare initially for historical data entry.
The fi rst suggested approach is for DSA data entry personnel to start with the day
one DSA completion certifi cate and enter all of them in ascending numerical order as
time permits until all of the precutover certifi cates have been entered into the new com-
puter system. One of the CPI testers put on her “boundary analysis hat” and observed
that the oldest DSA certifi cates (fi rst 2 year's worth) fall outside the 3-year retention
rule for searching and entering these certifi cates would be a waste of time and effort.
The suggested approach is amended to start with the fi rst certifi cates that are
less than 3 years old from the cutover date and proceed forward in time toward the
cutover date. Then the tester observed that some of the data entry effort under the
amended approach would still be wasted because the fi rst certifi cates that are less
than 3 years old from the cutover date fall outside the 3-year retention rule the month
or so after they are entered.
Finally, the CPI tester suggests that the historical data entry start from the last
completion certifi cates typed before the cutover and proceed back through the cer-
tifi cates in descending order. Using this approach, the certifi cates with the longest
retention time hence the most valuable to DSA are entered fi rst.
The third event occurred because of legislative changes in other states during the
development startup. The States of California, Arkansas, and New York notifi ed DSA
that their new laws required DSA to report all students who take DSA classes and re-
side in one of these three states. With CPI's help DSA contacts the data processing de-
partment of each state and negotiates an electronic fi le format for sending this report
to each state. Each state wants a different format (naturally). Because California is
usually the trendsetter in new kinds of state legislation, DSA suspected that over time
most of the other 48 states will impose similar reporting demands on driver training
companies nationwide. Whatever solution CPI proposes must allow for later expan-
sion of the capability to encompass additional state reports with minimal effort.
The developers and testers meet to discuss the best overall approach to complete
the remaining work in the shortest schedule. The agreed approach will start with
the development and testing of the historical data entry screen. As the historical
data entry screen task is launched, a second task to address the redesign and
redevelopment of the basic certifi cate record processing fl ow design will be started.
This second task is expected to take the lion's share of the CPI development and
testing resources. The third task to develop and test the new out-of-state reporting
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