Testing and marketing commercial accounting software packages : the case of BMS financials.

• Main Authors: Chua, Lionel., Lee, Fong Lay., Siong, Guan-Cheng.
• Other Authors: Nanyang Business School
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: DRNTU::Business::Accounting
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/51207
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

In face of increasing competition, MA Consulting Services (a small, local software development firm) saw the need to seek new product and marketing avenues. It thus turned to the development of a standardised accounting software package (BMS Financials) to cater to what it perceived as the common local business needs. Testing was one of MA’s major concerns as it sought to obtain assurance of the software product’s performance before its release into the marketplace. In mid-1995, the company invited our student group to undertake these testing activities, as it was at the development phase where it required independent testers with accounting knowledge to perform objective testing on BMS Financials. Through a ‘finding and fixing’ process, our task was to establish confidence that the software was a quality product ready for market release. We have provided in this report, a detailed and systematic coverage of the testing strategy and results, as well as a suggested software marketing approach. It is hoped that our test model in particular would serve as a useful guide to others for testing under circumstances similar to our case. In the process of understanding how such a software is built in a vendor’s environment, we present an overview of the vendor’s (MA Consulting Services) software development process and its marketing environment. We finally derive a five-step vendor’s Systems Development Life Cycle suited to the MA case.