How NZQA confidently passes exams every year with QA & Testing.

Assurity has been instrumental in NZQA’s success and has been for ten years, says Ciubotaru. “Together, we do quite a bit of testing to ensure that our systems work as expected before they go into production.”

In practice, Assurity provides performance testing across all NZQA systems with a particular focus on results publication day. This is a significant event for the organisation (and the country at large) in which the equivalent of months’ worth of logins and user activity ‘hit’ in the minutes and hours when exam results go live.

It may sound simple – just test the maximum number of concurrent users, right? – but nothing could be further from the truth, Ciubotaru points out. “Complexity and change are our biggest challenges. Our systems aren’t constant, and every exam cycle
is different. The number of systems we have interacting is so substantial that getting someone up to speed on all the dependencies and intricacies can take months or even years. At the same time, there is a major push towards digital transformation; these changes are like changing the engines of a jet in flight.”

A further area in which Assurity provides thought and delivery leadership is Targeted Exploratory Testing. This addresses the volume of work necessary for continual quality assurance and is considered a key component of the NZQA delivery model. “Exploratory testing has accelerated the process of evaluating complex intertwined systems with innovative approaches to testing,” says Ciubotaru.

Explaining that Assurity has demonstrated an ability to think outside the box and think big picture, she says examples include planned ‘Just in Time’ testing where team members log in as users and use systems just ahead of go-live, with a consistent ability to identify and resolve issues before they have real-world impacts. “With the nature of exams, this is crucial – testing well in advance isn’t enough because come exam day, those tests just aren’t relevant any longer.”

Assurity has also created a dashboarding system which replaces previous disparate reports and spreadsheets tracking performance. By creating a consolidated visual system, NZQA personnel enjoy immediate insight into how exams, results and other essential metrics are tracked. The system is so successful that it is published on public screens within the company today, attesting to the confidence NZQA enjoys that its systems can be relied upon.