Functional Software System Testing: The Friendly ATM

Money doesn’t grow on trees, but it does come out of ATMs (or at least it is supposed to).

An ATM software provider had an ongoing demand for managing and monitoring self-service ATMs.  Their customers, high-level bank executives, had two objectives: keep track of an ATM’s serviceability and rate their vendors on ATM supply fulfillment (cash on hand, paper and ink for receipts, etc.).

These bank executives wanted to have a user-friendly database to quickly look across the world, at any point of the day, for any ATMs that maybe out of service.  Why?  Anytime an ATM goes into downtime, there is a potential for lost revenue or a lost customer.  This also kept a tab on tracking and evaluating their service vendors who should be providing cash replenishment to their ATMs.

With Lighthouse’s proven methodology in testing, this software provider engaged Lighthouse to write requirements, build test plans, build & execute test cases, capture & report metrics, and provide test reports for their proprietary database front-end software.  As Lighthouse captured the requirements, they facilitated discussions with their development teams to assure everyone was in sync.

In a 3 month period, Lighthouse provided a veteran test lead and 5 seasoned testers to perform the software system testing.  950 test cases were defined and executed during the Functional System Test, with 2 full regression cycles.  This allowed the experienced developers to focus on coding, while Lighthouse provided the independent testing capability.

Many success factors came into play with this project.  Lighthouse’s involvement in the requirements planning ensured that the requirements were complete, unambiguous, necessary, and testable.  Lighthouse’s standardized peer review of test plans ensured the completeness of plans and the accuracy of test cases.  The quality focused background and experience of Lighthouse’s testers painted a bigger picture view of the project, rather than just running tests cases just for the sake of it.

The success factor isn’t just based on what Lighthouse delivered during this project.  Following this project, they were asked to team up again to perform software system testing for the phase 2 release of this database.

In a 3 month period, Lighthouse provided a veteran test lead and 5 seasoned testers to perform software system testing…they were asked to team up again for the phase 2 release of the ATM software provider’s proprietary front-end software database.