UIS's Marina Durbin Improves Research Administration Test Practices for Higher Education InfoEd Clients

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InfoEd, the provider of CU's electronic Research Administration (eRA) applications, collaborates with its users to help drive the future direction of their suite of products. As such, InfoEd relies on its client institutions to provide user acceptance testing each time a new enhancement or feature is rolled out.

Relying on her many years of programming experience and of developing and teaching Software Testing Theory and Software Test Automation Tools courses, Marina Durbin, eRA QA and Release Manager, changed eRA Quality Assurance (QA) practices at CU from Level 1 (Initial) to Level 3 (quantitatively managed), according to the Quality Maturity Model.

Durbin introduced the following practices to increase CU's eRA QA:

1. Organized bi-weekly cycles replacing the ad hoc application of manual patches, minimizing the need to coordinate downtime with eRA users and improving the quality of testing.
2. The introduction of automated "sanity testing," which is a QA test method that allows testers to do just the right amount of testing needed to validate minor changes to a product. Durbin accomplished this change using HP Quick Test to develop automated scripts. Durbin will share her methodology at the 2015 InfoEd User Group Meeting (UGM) May 18-21. For most of UGM's attendees, these test scripts will be their first exposure to automated testing.
   
   The scripts will help improve the quality of InfoEd's suite of applications by minimizing the amount of hands-on work required by clients, which reduces user error. Additionally, the scripts will maximize the quality of the testing itself. By making UIS's test scripts available to all session attendees, Durbin will spread a proven practice developed by CU to help users increase productivity within their own institutions.
3. In collaboration with UIS's Enterprise Cloud Services group, improvements to the process of refreshing eRA environments using automated scripts were developed to refresh application servers. With some minor modifications, these scripts will work for other institutions. Jordan Wight, eRA Technical Lead and Durbin will present these scripts at the InfoEd UGM.

Durbin is offering both a presentation (in collaboration with Wight) and a poster session to ensure the greatest possible distribution of this efficiency-building tool.   

Read more about Durbin's sessions. Image 1 shows the poster Durbin will present.

Want to learn more about CU's involvement in UGM? Check out UIS News on the UIS home page. Want to learn more about research administration at CU? Access campus research departments.