PeopleSoft Test Framework

Application testing is one of the critical and challenging tasks in Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) projects. Application testing is more focused on functional/business specification, user interface, security and performance. Among all of them, functional testing is the most demanding job as it requires participation from various stakeholders like developers, testers and business users. Usually business users have only limited time to dedicate for the functional testing activities as their business-as-usual tasks are on priority.

PeopleSoft Test Framework (PTF) is a testing tool delivered with PeopleTools 8.51 and above. PTF automates various tasks within PeopleSoft application, primarily functional testing. Automated functional testing helps the business users in executing more test cases with greater accuracy in a short period.

PTF works by replicating the actions of a single user executing functional tests against the PeopleSoft browser-based application. Users can record manual test procedures and save them within the framework. Later, for instance after an application upgrade or patch, the tests can be executed against the application to verify whether the application still behaves as expected.

Below are 2 videos from Oracle on PTF Introduction and walk through with examples:

PeopleSoft Test Framework Part 1

PeopleSoft Test Framework Part 2
 

PTF can be used effectively in the following scenarios:

• New Implementation Projects/Upgrades. Especially in the upgrade projects where test cycles are conducted over and over again.
• Limited functional resources for testing.
• Highly customized application.
• Significant ongoing development projects
• Routinely deploying patches and fixes
• Can be used for different kind of tests like – System, Integration, Upgrade, UAT on different environments since it can be easily migrated

Data Archival

What is Archival?

Archival is a process of moving out the data which is currently not active to a location only meant for record keeping. In other words the data that would no longer be affected or will affect any transaction will be moved. Archival can be Physical Separation of data (moving the data from current location/device to a new/different location/device) or Logical Separation of data (logically grouping the data and moving within the same area).

Logical Separation is done by creating another table/record whose structure is a copy of the existing record and moving the non active data to the new record within the same database.

Why Archival?

• To improve application performance – better response time of application online pages, reports and batch processes
• To reduce hardware and storage costs
• To simplify tuning and maintaining large databases
• To help PeopleSoft application developers on response time
• To assist database managers/administrators
• To be used for Audit, compliance and information governance specialists
• To reduce the transaction data growing at the exponential rate
• To retain the detailed information for a longer time
• Statutory & Legislative requirements to hold historical data

Why Historical Data is required?

Long term data retention requirements

• Past Payroll data
• Previous fiscal year books of account
• Customer problems/issue logs
• Providing better response to worker/customer
• History Timesheets / Payslip
• CRM Cases
• Closed/Billed historical Invoices

Regulatory Compliance

• UK/India statutory and legislative requirements
• Internal/External Audit

Archival approach – Our Experience

On receiving the requirement from the client we have made a list of modules that the user has implemented. We have made an analysis of the data and the tables that were involved with these modules. We divided our approach into 5 different steps.

PeopleSoft Data Archival Manager:
After analysis of industry leading archival products for PeopleSoft, DAM is the tool we  selected to perform the archival activity at one of our leading staffing client. Pictorial representation of archival data movement is given below,

Value Addition:
Our value addition to the PeopleSoft Data Archival Manger includes,

• Inbuilt Database Maintenance activity on archive tables.
• Table locking to preserve structure on archive tables.
• Approach to handle non structured tables.
• Unique approach to handle partitioned object archival

Data Archival duration:

Data Archival project varies based on the type of the archival (Physical/Logical), Tool used. Our recommendation for PeopleSoft application archival is PeopleSoft Data Archival Manager. It just works with minor tweeking.

For more details, feel free to contact us