Oasis Upgrade

I had said last night that we would start Saturday morning at 7:00 AM by compiling forms and reports into OASIS but I probably won’t be there at 7:00 AM.  Everything that I stated last night was accurate, the OASIS Development group is compiling and I wasn’t there at 7:00AM!  The positive aspect to coming to campus on Saturday is that parking is very, very easy to find and there is no line for coffee!

The goal by the end of the day is to have the Banner 8.3 environment completely prepared – including USF programs – so that tomorrow, all of the offices that use OASIS can test the system (User Acceptance Testing – UAT) to be sure that they are getting the results that they expect.   To reach that goal, OASIS Development group will do what is referred to as Quality Assurance (QA) Testing.  This is not the first time that QA and UAT are occurring.  I work with a person who likes to say “Proper Preparation Prevents Poor Performance”; this is key for a project of this size.  All the steps that are involved in the upgrade have to be preformed, issues identified, mediated, and process established before the upgrade weekend.  The intended result is, upgrade weekend, we execute against the plan.  It is sort of like a sports team (except we don’t really leave our chairs much or sweat to run our game plan), they practice, have plans and plays written and practiced in advance, find issues and resolve them so that when they get to game day, they execute against the game plan. (BTW, football game time tonight 7:05 PM – GO BULLS!)

I digress, so we are now to the point where we have finished compiling forms and reports and are opening access to IT staff to start QA testing.  There are close to 100 tasks that need to be completed in QA testing; we want to be sure that the new version of Banner, the USF developed system functionality, and new hardware (the 9 servers mentioned before) work together with no issue before we open OASIS to  UAT tomorrow morning.  I’ll be back later.