The Client

The client is among the third largest college in Ontario, serves approximately 15,000 full-time students and 25,000 part-time students. The college is Canadian leader in applied post-secondary education. It offers bachelor’s degree, diploma, apprenticeship certificate, and post-diploma, besides corporate and contract training programs. The client has iteratively developed GeneSIS, a fully functional Student Information System. GeneSIS provides a wide range of features that are required to provide the information needed to operate the college

The Scenario

These are the common characteristics that the college shares with other educational institutions:

• Establish an automated Student Information and Administration System, GeneSIS. Different areas of the college will interact with the system in very different ways, during the college’s academic cycle.
• Version 1.0 of GeneSIS represents the first release of the ‘Student Management’ functions, which has been added to the existing ‘Curriculum Management’. This provides a single system for all student-related data.
• It includes very complex functionalities that implement the college’s and Ontario’s rules, guidelines, and policies that govern the delivery of curriculum and student registration. For example, the ‘Scheduling Management’ follows complex rules, while timetabling against different section formats and assigning professors.
• It automates the inventory of all the facilities provided to the students and staffs. This includes parking lots, rooms and lockers, which are directly integrated with the student module.
• With GeneSIS, each student’s progression from course to course is driven by the prerequisites, co-requisites, and equivalencies entered against each course number.
• The program of study outlines all the courses students are required to complete in order to qualify for a diploma or certificate. It is one of the most important elements of the Genesis system linking the curriculum with student records.
• GeneSIS interacts with OCAS during the admission process. There is a defined process for student admission to any program.
• Users will be assigned a ‘Profile’ that will provide access to only those sections deemed necessary for the user’s job function. Therefore, not all users will have access to, or indeed see, all the menu items available.
• GeneSIS offers a huge number of user-specific reports. The reports are separated and held at a central location for pick-up. This offers a degree of security for sensitive data.
• Other than GeneSIS, Testing scope includes the college student information system (acronym as ACSIS) and Graduate referral service (GRADS).
• College ensures that ACSIS be compatible with Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Netscape as a minimum.

About GeneSIS

GeneSIS is an all-inclusive Student Information and Administration System. GeneSIS was developed by the college to provide a feature-rich application and database to support all aspects curriculum and student administration. It provides functionality to implement the college’s and Ontario’s rules, guidelines, and policies that govern the delivery of curriculum and student registration. Kumaran preserved the GeneSIS application against its very complex application’s design and business rules.

Kumaran Solution

We understand that organizations that use legacy applications would have evolved over years of business enhancements for which functional documents may not have been updated. Kumaran software testing services has applied its own testing strategy for testing the transformed .Net application to ensure the maximum quality.

Functional test case preparation started during the design phase. Education domain SMEs explored the existing GeneSIS application and documented the complex business scenarios. The functional inputs were gathered from client through demos. To ensure the test case coverage. Ingress source code was referred, while reviewing the functional test case document.

Back-end testing has played a vital role in securing the data integrity between the modules. Kumaran carried out backend testing by pointing both the legacy and .Net application to the same database.

System-level testing has been done to ensure the browser compatibility concurrency, localization, and performance of the application. Kumaran ensured the data integrity between GeneSIS, ACSIS, and GRADS by end-to-end integration testing.

Benefits

Preserved Business Rules

As a result of using our unique testing strategy Kumaran was able to preserve the very complex business rules in GeneSIS application. The college is able to continue its services effectively using the transformed .Net application without any problem.

Ensured Data Integrity

Kumaran has added value to the customer by ensuring the data integrity between the GeneSIS, ACSIS, and GRADS. These distributed applications has centralized Ingres database. Kumaran has done database testing to ensure smooth information flow between these applications. End-to-end scenarios covering all these modules ensured the data flow between them.

Customer Satisfaction

Kumaran has met all the requirements from the customer in terms of retaining its many years of refined business logics and maintaining the performance against the web application standards.