The Iowa Public Employees’ Retirement System (IPERS) is a $32 billion public pension system serving more than 350,000 members. Its mission is to administer a cost-efficient retirement plan that provides lifetime pension payments to public employees and serves to attract and retain a quality
workforce.
Recently, a planned major upgrade to its system administration software required IPERS to standardize its testing process in an effort to streamline its communication between the IT team and the business stakeholders. Through an RFP process, Original Software was selected as the best technology tool to accomplish its testing goals.
Prior to 2015, IPERS did not have a formal testing strategy. Sharon Stilwell, a management analyst at IPERS, says “Our testing was left up to the individual, who relied on spreadsheets and self-knowledge to test what they felt was needed.”
Testing was done more on an ad-hoc basis rather than a documented process that tracked test results. Each tester followed their own best practices; some used screen-shots for documentation and others did not.
IPERS testing process suffered from a lack of structure, documentation, detailed
scenarios and consistency. With a major system upgrade in the near future, it was
essential to standardize the overall testing process.