Portsmouth City Council, a local authority in Hampshire, serves a population of over 200,000 residents. The council provides essential public services, ranging from social care to housing and infrastructure. In 2019, Portsmouth City Council began a Fusion Cloud implementation project as both the former hardware and software were reaching the end of their useful economic lives and had to be upgraded by 2021.

“Oracle Fusion is used by the Council for finance, payroll and HR functions, so the system is business critical.”, says Helen Klemm, Finance Manager at Portsmouth City Council.

Complex Project Required Structured Testing

The implementation was a challenge due to both the size and complexity of the system, as well as the ongoing pandemic that required the project members to collaborate remotely. In order to test the new system comprehensively while ensuring minimal disruption to the council’s services, Portsmouth realized that they needed a more effective method than their current spreadsheets in Excel.

“We decided to use Reqtest to record our test data, rather than managing testing results on spreadsheets.” Helen said. We wanted our results in real time and didn’t want the overhead of updating and using spreadsheets.  It also helped us monitor defects and whether we were meeting our quality criteria.

Reqtest was used throughout the project to record the testing and results, and to highlight issues when the system functionality did not work as it should. Helen explains:

“Initially it was used to help support our confidence testing, for example: was the new system going to meet our needs, will we be able to pay people, collect income and make payments. We then used the Reqtest system to support our system integration testing, where we were seeking to make sure inbound and outbound data transmitted correctly. Finally, we used it to support our user acceptance testing, where we sought to ensure that our business and system workflows worked correctly.

Successful Launch of the new System

Despite the challenging conditions brought on by the pandemic, the team successfully met the set deadline and went live with the system as planned.

“The Fusion Cloud implementation project went live as planned in April 2021 and there were no significant defects in our production environment, which was important when working with such a critical system.

Reqtest Enabled Control and Progress Overview

By using Reqtest, Helen explains that Portsmouth was able to take control of both the quality and the progress of the project.

“With Reqtest we all knew our exact test results in real time. This helped us to assess whether we were meeting our quality gate thresholds, before progressing on to the next stage of testing.”

Managing the Maintenance

After Go Live, Reqtest has been continuing supporting the maintenance of the Oracle Fusion system. Helen explains:

“Due to the flexibility we have continued to use Reqtest since go live in several ways, including: to monitor our quarterly patch testing results; to monitor our development workplan, and as an incident management tool to help us to maintain the integrity of our production environment.”