Our Success Stories
Defense Property Accountability System (DPAS)
DPAS is a property management system used by the Department of Defense (DoD). It serves as the Accountable Property System of Record (APSR) for over 32 DoD agencies and military services. Some of the services provided by DPAS include Accountability for Real Property Stewardship land, military property, heritage assets, personal property, GFE or government furnished equipment. Additionally, DPAS provides asset management capabilities such as life cycle management, inventory management-interfaces with the lates scanners, redistribution/asset visibility, maintenance and utilization, warehousing of parts, tools and equipment management, authorized allowances. DPAS also provides property financial reporting information like calculating depreciation based on asset type, or interface with accounting systems.
Challenges
Testing Before TestWheel
Initially, the testing conducted for DPAS was run on a case-to-case basis targeting specific System Change Requests or SCR’s that were in their final stage of development. The original testing process was a 4-day User Acceptance Testing event, including receiving test cases provided by the DPAS Program Management Office. During this period, the time spent focused mostly on manually testing the SCRs (System Change Requests), leaving the rest of the system un-tested. Ad hoc testing may provide more time for manual resources to focus on other tasks. However, it comes at the cost of identifying potential system issues generated from adding and removing code to specific areas of the system. This is where things like regression testing play a role, but manual regression testing requires an extensive amount of time as well as documentation of results and expected results. The lack of consistent regression testing means there was no detection or validation of the potential side effects of the change.
“No regression testing was being performed on functional areas outside of the SCRs with no validation of side effects of the change.”
-Timothy Thompson, Program Manager, DPAS Support Team
Requirements/Goals
The goals for DPAS included a wide range of criteria commonly associated with application testing. The major requirements for a solution included the following…
- Resource mitigation
- Time Savings
- Regular Regression Testing
- Test Reporting and Documentation
Solution
When looking at the numerous obstacles in the path for DPAS to test effectively and efficiently TestWheel, was a great solution. The main goal was to create a consistent regression test system to allow for testing the entire system rather than running spot checks on areas where changes were made. TestWheel’s simple Excel based test building platform provides the perfect base to build regression tests to run repeatedly. TestWheel also allows for its users to make any minor changes to test documents within the web application to allow for seamless editing and updating to regression test scripts and workflows.
Additionally, TestWheel provides detailed test reports with information regarding every test step from start to finish along with an image for each step and the screen capture recording of the entire automated test.
“Having TestWheel amplifies testing capabilities, strengthens implementation of system changes, and improves the overall user experience.”
-Timothy Thompson Program Manager, DPAS Support Team
Benefits
TestWheel helps DPAS test outside of purely an ad-hoc line of testing. By using TestWheel the Air Force is able to test the entire system quickly and allow manual resources to maintain their focus on SCRs thus increasing overall testing capability.
The use of TestWheel allows for more secure and error-free updates to the system. Test documentation and reporting helps target specific problem areas to identify any workflow changes or broken bits of the system. Using recordings and images to document the test process makes error identification a breeze. Additionally, the reporting and documentation assists with presentation to key stakeholders to display results of SCRs and other updates to the system.
