The Australian Parliament passed legislation, effective July 2013, to create DisabilityCare Australia, the new independent statutory body administering the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). DisabilityCare Australia required a seamless solution to support the full range of financial and human resource management operation systems. Furthermore, it required integration with the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA) grants management system in Siebel to support the delivery of DisabilityCare Australia’s business.
KJ Ross & Associates were engaged by FaHCSIA on the SAP implementation for DisabilityCare Australia. KJ Ross supplied test management and specialist SAP testing resources to provide a full service testing capability for the project. The scope of the project covered:
- The creation of a new company code within the existing SAP instance
- A new security model for users of this company code
- New ESS and MSS functionality for DisabilityCare
- Siebel integration
- Annual SAP Support packs
- End of financial year testing, and
- NetWeaver 7.0 upgrade.
The services provided by the KJ Ross & Associates Team were:
- Document/Requirements Analysis
- Test Strategy and Planning
- Resource Planning
- Environment and Test Release Management
- System/Functional Testing
- Integration Testing (internal/external)
- Security Testing
- Defect Management and Reporting
- Regression & Support Patches Testing
- UAT Coordination & Facilitation
Implementation
The duration of the project was 10 months.
Given the compressed timeframe for Project Delivery and the low maturity in the SDLC and testing practice at FaHCSIA, KJ Ross & Associates conducted a brief discovery phase at the commencement of the project to assess the strengths of the project team and leveraged many of these strengths in creating a formalised process for the testing activities of DisabilityCare Australia. Manual role-based testing was conducted as there were no tools or scope for automation of testing in this project. Role based testing allowed all security and authorisation issues to be detected early. Regression testing for the DisabilityCare solution was conducted together with the application of the Support packs due to schedule pressures. A risked Based Testing approach was utilised to target defect hotspots and ensure highest priority was given to those test cases with the highest use, highest probability of failure as well as all internal and external integration points.
Measurement of Success
For DisabilityCare Australia’s SAP implementation to be deemed successful, the following identified performance measures needed to be met:
- Achievement of a zero defects in line with FaHCSIA’s zero defect policy which required a project-wide approach and a broader quality perspective.
- Efficiency in test activities and effectiveness in communication with stakeholders.
- Test scripts and execution were captured in HP Quality Centre to ensure traceability and create re-usable artefacts for future regression cycles.
- Role-based testing ensured the configuration of new security roles to authorise users for the new company code in the system were robust as well as to ensure separation of duties and defining business processes for back-office functions within a specified company code.
Key Outcomes
- Testing resulted in the SAP team achieving a positive outcome in line with FaHCSIA’s Zero Defect Policy.
- Achieved high levels of user satisfaction in UAT. All functionality was accepted.
- Improvements to test processes have left a last impression on the SAP services team. Testing is now central to the team and fully integrated in decision-making processes for current and upcoming releases.
- Test driven development and an early engagement for this project compensated for a lack in requirements and business analysis. As the DisabilityCare organisation was being formed concurrently with the development of its SAP solution, there was no formal engagement of the business simply because it didn’t exist yet. By testing against informed assumptions, leveraging corporate knowledge of FaHCSIA’s existing business and engaging business stakeholders as they came on board, KJ Ross & Associates were able to work effectively with FaHCSIA’s SAP Security team to create a security model that resulted in high user satisfaction and was defect-free by the time the solution reached the UAT phase.
- KJ Ross & Associates’ detailed execution and defect reporting and excellence in the use of HP Quality Centre provided project management and executive management a new level of insight into the SAP release.