Alpharetta, GA, June 15, 2013 – Provaré Technology is pleased to announce that it has completed the testing and data validation of Testcraft for the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO) and that Testcraft successfully went live today with no problems experienced or reported.
Warren Prince
“This has been a long and complex effort and was certainly not without its surprises and challenges,” said Warren Prince, the INPO project manager tasked with managing the transition to Testcraft. “But we are finally online and everything appears to be working smoothly.”
There were definitely challenges. But no project is without them. And some of them make good stories.
For example, when we were load (capacity) testing the Testcraft installation overnight, we were initially limited to only about 300 users. We knew it was a network bandwidth issue, but we couldn’t figure out what was causing it. When the INPO IT staff arrived the following morning, they found that their email server had crashed. It turned out that an esoteric setting in Testcraft had caused thousands and thousands of warning emails to be generated and sent to the administrator account. The offending emails were purged and the email server was fine. Once the setting was changed, we were ultimately able to get to 7,000+ users before the system performance became unacceptable.
“The Provaré team kept telling me that we would find something – and maybe several somethings – that limited our capacity early in the testing,” says Prince. “My gut believed them because I know they’re usually right, but I wanted to hope that our case would be the first to be clean from the get-go. Not only were we not that lucky, but we confirmed their expectations in a pretty spectacular and highly visible way. It was a little funny after it was fixed, but I admit that I sweated a few bullets during the process!”
“This was a great project and Warren and his team were wonderful to work with,” says Sandi Tepper, manager of the Provaré testing and validation effort. “We are all able to celebrate this success because everyone involved was determined to work together to get it right. I wish all of our customers and projects had this high a degree of trust and commitment. I can’t wait to work with Warren again.”
Established by the nuclear power industry in December 1979, the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO) is a not-for-profit organization headquartered in Atlanta whose mission is to promote the highest levels of safety and reliability – to promote excellence – in the operation of commercial nuclear power plants through establishing performance objectives, criteria and guidelines for the nuclear power industry; conducting regular detailed evaluations of nuclear power plants; and providing assistance to help nuclear power plants continually improve their performance. The National Academy for Nuclear Training is the division of INPO that is responsible for training and certification of all nuclear power plant workers in the United States. NANTeL is the branch of the National Academy for Nuclear Training that creates and administers all of INPO’s online training courses. The NANTeL course repository houses hundreds of training courses and administers courses and exams to thousands of student nuclear workers per day. Visit http://www.inpo.info/Index.html.
Founded in 2004, Provaré Technology specializes in transformational quality and productivity improvement for any organization by focusing on business process, increasing agility, intelligent selection of enabling technologies and tools, and a complete suite of QA services. Visit www.Provaré.com.