In this phase of the release cycle, the new release will be available in your QA environment and now all of the planning for our acceptance testing can be applied. It is expected that during this phase all of our acceptance testings will be performed, outcomes of these tests will be evaluated, issues and errors will be logged and resolved, and the release will be validated.
While we are in the Release phase of your Pricefx implementation, this is the time to begin the active acceptance testing phase of our release cycle. As part of this phase, we should be discussing the following questions:
Are my acceptance tests successful?
If any acceptance test is failing, how am I logging these errors?
Are acceptance errors in the Pricefx Core or are they within my solution’s Configuration?
Who is responsible for correcting any acceptance errors?
Have all of my acceptance test cases been identified and created?
Release Available Phase Tasks
Before starting our upgrade acceptance testing, we should consider the impact of the following:
Upgrade Testing Process
Testing in QA is your opportunity to assess how the upgrade will impact your Production from both a change and risk perspective. For example, to reveal if changes or updates would be needed to your SSO or ERP integrations, or help bring your superusers up to speed on the new release.
If no upgrade testing is performed, then all issues, misunderstandings, or problems encountered later are resolved under COSA. If these issues aren’t discovered and resolved before the upgrade, then the production application will be temporarily unavailable until resolved.
Upgrade Test Plan
Existence or creation of an organized and disciplined approach to your upgrade testing, to avoid any undiscovered gaps in the test plan that could lead to potential problems. A common symptom is when testers are performing tests without proper preparation and prioritization of critical functionality. There should always be a clear prioritization of our test cases.
LEARN MORE: To learn more about the development of a Test Plan, guidelines, and recommendations for this task, then click here.
Time Allocation
Ensure that the team of selected testers has the necessary time to perform the test cases assigned to them due to the volume of their other work. Without the proper time allocation to fulfill your upgrade test plan in its entirety will inevitably to undiscovered gaps in the upgrade preparation.
Upgrade Preparation During Release
During the Release period of the upgrade cycle, and as a best practice, Pricefx recommends that these steps be performed:
Logging Bugs
As the upgrade testing progresses, and various issues are discovered, these errors need to be logged so fixes can be applied and then re-tested. Any errors discovered should be prioritized using the following suggested set of categories:
Priority | Explanation |
|---|---|
CRITICAL | User is unable to use the solution, resulting in a critical impact on business operations. This condition requires immediate resolution. (ie. The system is down) |
HIGH | Any high priority defect which results in an incorrect price calculation. No workaround is available, and the defect is time sensitive. (ie. Defect is blocking pricing from being exported to ERP systems) |
MEDIUM | The defect requires attention but does not block pricing utilization. A workaround is available but may not be optimal. (ie,. Defect requires the user to perform manual calculations) |
LOW | Minor loss of functionality. These may be monitoring issues, clarifications, documentation questions; or administrative tasks. (ie. Update the column label or any other cosmetic related defects) |
Each of our testers should be logging their results every day. If an issue is discovered, then the appropriate level of documentation to assist in fixing the issue should be provided (ie. expected vs actual result, error messages, screenshots, etc).
LEARN MORE: To learn more about the practice of logging and cataloging any errors that are encountered, then click here.
Code Promotion
Once all of the test cases have been performed and the results have been verified, then it is time to promote the core code from the QA system to your PROD environment.
Upgrade Smoke Test
The final step of your checklist will be the performance of a smoke test or build verification test to determine if all of the most critical functions of your application are performing as expected. This is a preliminary test of the new upgrade and its functionality.
LEARN MORE: To learn more about resolutions to common issues related to Pricefx upgrades, you can click here.