ServiceLine Testing: A Diversion from Development

Within the first couple of days of my internship a lady entered the office I work in and seemed excited by the prospect of an intern – and thus I was recruited into the testing of a product called ServiceNow. ServiceNow is a system for the reporting and management of issues, requests and the like within the university. The section I was specifically testing was the interface for students to report issues, and monitor their progress.

So I arrived at the test suite at 9am and was provided with an .xlsm file detailing the specific tasks I was to run through alongside their expected outcome. Alongside these were a couple of columns for me to enter into – most importantly were the ‘Pass/Fail’ and ‘Actual Result’ columns.

The first few tasks were your run-of-the-mill questions evaluating the initial experience: ‘You can log in and are taken to the Landing Page’ (rather important), ‘The logo and branding match the University of Southampton branding’, ‘Options X, Y and Z are available in the navigation menu’ etc.

Then the more in-depth testing came: There were three main departments tickets could be submitted to – Finance, HR and IT. I was provided with an (almost identical) list of tasks for each to run through, attempting to submit tickets through all available options and seeing what would break. There were some issues here and there – generally everything went very smoothly for the HR section, though there were some difficulties with the other two. Everything seemed fine from the front end, but things were hanging up on the back-end (being sat next to someone who was monitoring the system made analysing this significantly easier). I should imagine this won’t be too difficult to remedy as the three department’s tickets were almost identical, so if one works fine then it should be easy to compare to the others to determine the issue.

There were a few other issues present – an occasional dead link, missing information and the likes. Overall though, the system seemed to hold up well – it has things to be fixed, of course, but that’s the whole purpose of testing it.

This’ll be left as the rather short post that it is – the Open Badges project is reaching a potential climax, however, so I’ll hopefully have a lot to write about very soon.