Many Hands Make Light Work:
A Practical Approach to QA Testing
David Goodrum, Academic and Faculty Services
Lynn Ward, Principal Systems Specialist
Roger Henry, Instructional Technology Consultant
Amy Neymeyr, Training and Support Specialist
Margaret Ricci, Instructional Technology Consultant
Madeleine Gonin, Instructional Technology Consultant
Kristol Hancock, User Interaction Designer
Indiana University

Session Purpose
• Share functional QA experiences -- both
pluses and deltas
• Proposed a generalizable idea for
functional QA sharing in the community
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Origination of Our Approach
• Learning Technologies became functional
owner of IU's Sakai implementation.
• Key responsibilities:
• overall direction of IU's Sakai
implementation
• functional requirements and prioritization
• functional QA testing and sign-off
• close collaboration/communication with
development team
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QA resources:
• dedicated staff
• 5-10% slices of instructional technology
consultants
• Build on knowledge and experience of
instructional technology consultants
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QA Resources, Cont.
• Development Team (~10-12 staff)
• Tier 2 Support (2 staff)
• Functional team
• ~15 professional staff across multiple
campuses
• ~ 6 hourly workers
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Release Schedule
• 3 Major Releases per year (December,
June, August)
• Patch releases (every one or two months)
• Emergency Maintenance as needed
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Process
• Schedule Posted to local ConfluenceiInstance
• Megan May prepares master task list
• Functional task list in Google Doc
• Instructions, test scripts in Confluence, IU and/
or Sakai Jira, Google Docs
• Bugs reported in local Jira Instance
• Overall results monitored
• Functional signoff required on every release
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June 2009 Release Stats
(Functional Team Only)
• Regression and destructive testing (not
counting OSP): ~175 hours
• OSP testing (outsourced): ~170 hours
• Release day testing: ~48 hours
• Post Release Patch: ~50 hours
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And now for the…
FUNCTIONAL TESTER PERSPECTIVE
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For More Information…
• Lynn Ward (leward@iupui.edu)
• David Goodrum (goodrum@indiana.edu)
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