When Cindy Wertz, Pitt Information Technology’s chief of staff, saw a presentation on CAI Neurodiverse Solutions (formerly known as Autism2Work), it piqued her interest. She brought it to the attention of Jamie Craig, associate director for enterprise applications. He readily identified areas within the IT department that would benefit from working with CAI Neurodiverse Solutions.

The Challenge

Pitt IT had already recognized a need for additional IT resources to help support their application testing routines. All routine testing was being performed manually by quality assurance (QA) staff, which was time-consuming and made it difficult to keep up with updates and changes being made in Salesforce.

The University had a growing tech ecosystem to maintain, leaving little time to devote to automation. The QA team’s bandwidth was challenged with balancing regular testing, the creation and monitoring of automated tests, and their day-to-day duties.

The Solution

The CAI Neurodiverse Solutions team built an automation testing solution for Pitt and established ways to conduct testing and track results efficiently. They also developed daily monitoring of the tests and automated solutions for executing them.

CAI Neurodiverse Solutions’ associates and the Pitt IT team collaborated to identify applications in the University’s environment that would benefit from automated testing. They created a test bed of “smoke tests,” or nightly application availability tests, to validate that systems are operating smoothly and report an application or network outage. The team also created a framework for automated Salesforce test execution in three major areas:

• Philanthropic and Alumni Engagement: A tracking application for visibility and monitoring of donations to schools.
• CoVax: An employee and student vaccine tracking application. This became necessary for scheduling COVID vaccinations for all University employees and students.
• Federated Authorization: A user access application for employee and student requests and tracking access to University applications in their digital infrastructure.

The Results

Salesforce testing that would have taken several days to perform can now be done in just a couple of hours. Pitt IT has automated 83% of the functional testing requirements, with an average of 16 automated tests per month. Additionally, they’ve set up the framework to accommodate 120 tests to run daily, with 90 regression tests deployed in Salesforce.  Because of these efforts, the Salesforce testing now averages a 94% success rate.

As a result of the diligent work of the CAI Neurodiverse Solutions team, and the advocacy and support from Pitt IT leadership, automated testing and career development for neurodivergent individuals were successfully launched at the University simultaneously.