ERP Testing - Understanding your Risks
The Standish Group's 2009 report, "CHAOS Summary 2009," showed a marked increase in project failure rates over the previous years. More than 60% of all projects failed to be delivered on time, on budget, and with the required features and functions as promised. 24% were cancelled prior to completion or delivered and never used.
It is because of these statistics that independent quality assurance activities including software testing, needs to be incorporated into the project plan from the very beginning and not thought of as an end of cycle activity.
The following article will describe how and why ERP implementations should have a special focus on quality assurance and testing.
Why do I need to test my application?
ERP implementations reveal that the quality of testing during a project plays a major role in the overall success of ERP initiatives. Comprehensive testing, conducted by a professional and independent body, is a critical component in the success of an ERP project. Since ERP systems can be a mission critical component of a business which directly manages an organization’s finance, sales, manufacturing and customer service functions, failed ERP implementations can cause loss of trust, a tarnished reputation and increased financial costs due to downtime and rising costs of rollout.
Leading ERP applications are installed at thousands of locations. I assume they are tested by the manufacturer?
There is a major difference between the delivery test that is done by the development company and the acceptance test that the testing company performs at the client site. In general, the delivery test is performed to ensure that the delivered application contains no basic bugs and that it is working properly. Conversely, acceptance testing is designed to ensure that the application is well integrated with the customer’s other applications/systems and fully fulfilled the customer needs and demands. During the acceptance test the actual customer end-to-end business processes are simulated in the process level, not the module level.
