“Testing, testing one-two-three” is a typical callout during audio checks, but it’s also a familiar Sunrise mantra to ensure we’ll have a sound system when Workday Student goes live.
While we’ve tested throughout the Student Sunrise project, we are moving into an intensive testing period that will leverage the expertise of our campus partners.
“Ever since October 2021 when we began designing and setting up our new student information system, the Sunrise team has tested various parts of the system to validate they’re working and to correct them when they’re not,” said Beth Lee, Student Sunrise functional project director. “By the time we fully roll out Workday Student to campus, we will have tested for four years. That’s longer than any other Workday client.”
More than 200 staff, faculty and students contributed to system design
At the end of October, Sunrise completed the Architect, Configure & Prototype (ACP) stage, or design and build portion of the project. During this stage, the Sunrise team, along with our Workday consultants, configured Workday Student for the specific needs of WashU. But this work wouldn’t have been possible without the guidance of the students, faculty and staff who are most familiar with WashU’s student information systems, data needs and academic processes. To date, nearly 200 individuals have helped inform the current design.
“We are so grateful for the help from our campus teams and faculty and staff advisory groups to date, and now we’re going to lean on their expertise again as we enter our formal testing stage,” said Erin Culbreth, senior associate provost and Student Sunrise executive project director. “We want them to be among the first to experience the system since they’ve played such an integral part in our accomplishments to date.”
Two years of intensive testing
On Oct. 30, the project began its nearly two-year Test & Deploy stage, which will run through September 2025. During this stage, we are shifting our focus to testing the core academic and business processes in Workday Student and the reports that we’ve custom-built to provide needed data and information. Many of these rely on integrations that allow data to flow between Workday and other systems that are used within WashU or outside the university, such as at governmental agencies.
Our objectives during testing are to confirm the Sunrise team can perform all academic term and system setup features and to make sure that all the different aspects of Workday – registration, curriculum, advising, etc. – are working as expected, on their own and with each other. We also will confirm that integrations and go-live critical custom reports are working as expected, data is appropriately accessible and secured, and all steps of business processes that flow into or out of Workday Student are functioning correctly.
Campus partners to participate in testing
Sunrise will be asking our campus teams and members of our faculty and student advisory groups to get some “hands on keyboard” time as well, executing different processes that they will be doing in the system. This will occur beginning in January. Campus team members will also contribute to developing the testing scenarios to ensure that the majority of situations are incorporated into testing plans.
Key contacts for university systems that integrate with Workday Student will be testing to ensure that integrations are working as expected. This testing will occur over eight “windows” according to when their integrations are scheduled for completion.
“We believe that our extensive testing will give WashU confidence that the system is working as designed,” Erin said. “We’d like to thank our campus partners in advance for giving us their critical review of the system and contributing to our go-live efforts.”