WFM Time Capture

Mobilize your WFM data.

The WFM data in your Production database has the potential to be very valuable to your WFM project team. It is the best kind of test data: real-world scenarios that you would never have thought to test for beforehand. It also contains all of the details needed to recreate production issues in a test environment, or to escalate particularly tough issues to your WFM vendor for resolution.

But there’s a problem.

The data is stuck in your Production database. You don’t want to experiment with potential solutions in Production, and it is not practical to copy the entire database to a test environment every time you need to investigate an issue.

That’s where Sability WFM TimeCapture comes in.

TimeCapture allows you to selectively copy employee profiles, timesheets, schedules, and related data between WFM environments quickly and easily. It even lets you mask sensitive employee information so that fields like SSN and birth date can remain private - a must for SOX compliance.

All of this translates into fewer production issues and faster resolution times. This can help the savvy WFM IT manager to reduce maintenance and support costs and realize their WFM project’s ROI more quickly.

A typical WFM release contains dozens of bug fixes and feature enhancements, each of which needs to be tested by a Quality Assurance team to ensure correct behavior. In addition, most WFM customers have implemented a regression test suite to reduce the likelihood of introducing new issues. Both forms of testing pose data-related challenges.

Reproducing and Resolving Issues

To resolve an issue, a developer first needs to reproduce it in another environment, one where it is safe to experiment with potential fixes. Without TimeCapture, the only practical way to do this is to manually recreate the scenario as accurately as possible, clicking through the UI and entering edits exactly as the user did in the Production environment. The major drawback of this approach is actually not the time it takes to enter all that data, but rather the difficulty of accurately recreating the production scenario.

Remember that this is a brand new issue, not one the developer understands yet. They may not realize that certain data is relevant to the issue and as a result fail to migrate it. Other times, the data simply cannot be entered manually because there is no suitable screen for entering it.

This is the most common reason that fixes can work well in a test environment but fail to resolve the same issues in production. Every time this happens, it costs you and your team valuable time, money, and credibility with your users.

Regression Testing: Trial by Fire

The best possible data to use for regression testing is Production data. This data depicts exactly how your users use the system - there is no better way to anticipate the challenges your WFM system will be faced with after the next release.

A major problem with production data is the sheer size of it. Even well-managed production databases can easily reach over 1TB in size - too much to copy to your development and test environments. It may also contain sensitive employee information that will need to be removed before your testers see it..

Without TimeCapture, there are two common approaches to this problem:

• Option 1. Do whatever it takes to find enough space for the entire production database on development or testing hardware, or
  
• Option 2. Make a best effort to simulate production data without actually using any before deploying to Production.
  

Option 1 can be expensive, time-consuming and impractical, and usually results in a very slow test server that is overloaded with data. Eventually this approach will cease to be feasible. This forces customers to stick with a very old copy of Production in the test environment, and over time the old data no longer fulfils its intended purpose: to provide an accurate reflection of the activity that takes place in Production.

Option 2 enjoys none of the benefits of testing using Production data, potentially resulting in unexpected behavior with each Production release. The effort required to create enough test data for a full regression test can be enormous, and provides a dangerously powerful incentive to not perform regression testing at all.

Sability WFM TimeCapture

TimeCapture allows you to specify a range of employee ID’s and dates to copy from one Workbrain / Infor WFM database to another. This is doneusing a SQL “where” clause, giving you great flexibility to migrate as few or as many timesheets as necessary for your purposes. By taking advantage of the integrated report and data browsing features, you can doublecheck that you are migrating the correct data before loading it into the target database.

You can include custom tables in the migration using XML configuration through a simple configuration tool. TimeCapture already includes all delivered Workbrain T&A tables related to timesheets and schedules out of the box.

Please contact sales@sability.com to arrange a demo or to obtain pricing and licensing information.

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