 |
Report
to Senior Engineer, Development Manager, Project Director |
|
Analyse
test results, provide graph reports of testing |
|
Analyse
testing problems, provide graph reports of problems |
|
Provide
reports for management meetings |
|
Advise
LTA management of testing issues and problems, progress of testing, any
other issues as arise |
|
Discuss
testing approach and test results with ERG Test Manager, improve test
processes. |
| Manage 3 testing staff |
I
was contracted to the Singapore Government's Land Transport Authority (LTA)
as a testing quality advisor to the Enhanced Integrated Fare System (EIFS)
project, a replacement system for the current bus and rail fare system (ITS).
EIFS will go live in Singapore in December 2001.
My immediate duties included providing weekly reports on concerns and
recommendations to improve the quality and testing process, attending senior
management meetings for resolving issues at a senior level, and discussing and
advising on matters directly to the EIFS Project Director, Design Manager and
Development Manager.
TesCom
Software Systems Testing Pte. Ltd
specialise in providing companies with a comprehensive, outsourced approach to
systems and applications testing. TesCom
plan, design, develop, and execute testing solutions for businesses to ensure
optimal performance, integration, and usability of their internal IT systems and
applications throughout our clients’ development process
Land
Transport Authority (LTA)
is the Singapore government's authority that manages work for the essential
transport services of Singapore, operating since September 1995.
ERG
Transit Systems is a
Perth based company that specialises in the manufacture of hardware and software
systems for bus and rail systems, regarded as the prime contractor by LTA
because ERG conduct all systems testing and operational field testing for all
companies/departments involved. Other
companies/departments (known as System-Wide Contractors (SWC)) involved in the
development of the EIFS system are:
|
· Cubic Transportation Systems Inc (CTS) |
|
· Ascom |
|
· Singapore Transport Electronics (STE) |
|
· TransitLink (TL) |
|
· Alcatel |
|
· Systems Equipment Development (SED) (LTA department) |
The EIFS system is planned to be installed into Sydney and Melbourne, Australia by the consortium of ERG, TransUrban and TransField.
Essentially an independent advisory role, I nonetheless took an active role in identifying and solving some of LTA’s less obvious quality problems. Some of these problems are:
|
Test coverage by ERG was difficult to identify and track due to the manner in which ERG had to conduct testing. |
|
Testing of the hardware and software was difficult and frustrating due to the late delivery of hardware and software by the SWC that meant that testing could not be properly scheduled. |
|
All Test Cases/Test Procedures were tracked as hardcopy documents that meant that metric reporting and test verification was difficult to collate. |
|
Software defects were not being tracked adequately to monitor the total number, severity and impact assessment of problems encountered. |
|
Traceability to the LTA’s requirements document, Design Criteria and Performance Specification (DCPS), is incomplete with many trace links missing. ERG stores details of requirements (product requirements (PR), use cases (UC), test cases (TC), test procedures (TP), and test designs (TD)) in Rational Software’s RequisitePro using MS Access as the back-end database |
I developed two software systems using MS Access to overcome the above problems.
The
Test Recording System (TRS) was loaded with details of all test
cases/test procedures from all available ERG documents.
The test cases/test procedures were generic enough to be used for
multiple hardware devices and so TRS was designed as one-test
case/procedure-to-many-devices, linked to a specific ERG document.
As each device specific test case/procedure is tested, the device is
updated with status of “Not Tested”, “Not Run”, “Failed” or
“Passed”, providing a method for test coverage and metrics reporting.
Additionally, test summary and release information were included into the
system.
Software
defects are entered into the ERG defect management system TestTrackPro.
Included
in TRS is a defects tracking sub-system that imports the defects data from TestTrackPro
and produces comprehensive metrics and graphs reporting.
Additionally I participated in the auditing of the ERG Test Case and Test Procedure documentation, known as Audit3.
Requirements traceability is a hot issue as the project comes nearer to production release as there is doubt from LTA that all requirements are being met and satisfied.
The
updating of the ERG RequisitePro database is an ERG internal matter but I was
able to assist by developing ReqTrace, an MS Access system, to trace each
product requirement to determine if each requirement had broken links.
Approximately 15% of the database has broken requirements links and
significant numbers that require to be classified as either ‘functional’,
‘non-functional’, ‘trace errors’ or ‘not applicable to EIFS’.
I
was requested to develop and audit the traceability of EIFS requirements.
This involved the combining of ERG’s RequisitePro and my ReqTrace,
Catalogue, and TRS systems as the Requirements system.