2. Case Study : National User

For a national user the challenge was how to carry out testing for a proposed system where there existed only regional examples, none of which covered all of the national functionality.

Business analysts and users alike had no large-scale “model” of the proposed new system, which was still under development.

Datamotive’s migration and implementation experience indicated that where computer systems are de-merging, or merging, or are simply unfamiliar, then data featuring in the legacy systems is not merely transformed or converted but often has a changed business significance in the new environment, Users can benefit greatly from a considered prediction of the ways in which the altered operation will treat their data, and what they will be expected to provide in order to realise the transition.

This was archived by providing a rough working model of the system, using realistic data gathered from a number of sources and loaded onto a demonstration database using Microsoft Access. It was possible to populate the enterprise-level database from this demonstration version.

The mechanism was used as a foundation to:

highlight and resolve design, usage, sourcing and security questions

provide test data with expected results

store and validate crucial reference data ready for pilot / live running

To shadow the main system entirely would, of course, have been a duplication of effort. In order to highlight in a practical fashion the “bare bones” functionality, the prototype used, as far as possible, well-known, reliable products which were relatively easy to manipulate.