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() Summary: COD School Testing for the 2004-2005 Award Year

Publication Date: December 15, 2003

Bulletin ID: DLB-03-46

Summary: COD School Testing for the 2004-2005 Award Year


Posted on 12-15-2003

December 2003

DLB-03-46

Subject: COD School Testing for the 2004-2005 Award Year

Dear Partner,

The COD School Relations Center will conduct school testing for the 2004-2005 Award Year from January 2004 through June 2004. School testing provides schools, third-party servicers, and software vendors an opportunity to test business processes and system software with the COD System prior to the transmission and processing of actual production data. It also allows the opportunity to make corrections or enhancements to software applications prior to entering into the "live" production environment.

All entities that wish to participate in COD School Testing must submit a formal signup document to the COD School Relations Center and be scheduled for each phase of testing. The signup document is located at the end of the School Testing Guide and is also available on COD Web Site by clicking on the "Today's Update" link.

Who should participate in School Testing?

Schools are not required to test with COD. However, Full Participants are strongly encouraged to participate in testing. Phase-In Participants, if they choose to test, may only participate in Phase II testing (see below).

Vendors/third-party servicers may perform their own product testing on behalf of their customers. The Department will test the EDExpress software before releasing it to schools. Additional school testing is at the option of the school. Schools should contact their vendor/third-party servicer to discuss testing concerns.

Schools new to the Direct Loan and/or Pell Grant Programs must complete school testing with COD before sending data into production.

What are the testing phases?

School testing is comprised of two phases, Phase I- Common Record Manual Verification and Phase II- Structured Application Testing.

  • Phase I - Common Record Manual VerificationThe purpose of the Common Record Manual Verification testing is to ensure that the school's XML Common Record is well formed and properly structured according to the rules of the 2.0d XML Common Record Schema. The 2.0d schema is available on the IFAP web site at: http://www.ifap.ed.gov/cod/COD0405CRXMLSchema20d.html.

The COD team manually reviews a Common Record document emailed to the COD School Relations Center by the school and assists the school in the identification of potential updates to their Common Record submissions. This testing phase is available from January 2004 through May 31, 2004. If you would like to participate in Phase I of testing, you must sign up by May 1, 2004. Full Participants must complete Phase I testing before participating in Phase II testing. Phase-In Participants do not participate in Phase I testing.

  • Phase II - Structured Application Testing
    The purpose of the Structured Application Testing is to ensure that participants can send, receive, and process batches of records using detailed input instructions with detailed expected results issued by COD. Schools use a test ISIR file supplied by COD that creates a test data set of students to use with the structured test cases. This testing phase is available from March 2004 through June 2004. If you would like to participate in Phase II testing, you must sign up by May 1, 2004.

    During this phase, Full Participants send Common Record documents to COD and receive Common Record receipts and response documents back from COD. Phase-In Participants send fixed-length, flat files to COD and receive acknowledgements in fixed-length file format back from COD. Schools must verify that these files can be loaded and processed correctly in their system.

How Do I Sign Up for School Testing?

Schools register for testing by completing the Signup Document located at the end of the School Testing Guide or on COD Web Site by clicking on the "Today's Update" link. Once completed, the signup document should be submitted to the COD School Relations Center. After the signup document is received, COD School Relations Center will contact the school via email to obtain school-specific information and to schedule specific test dates for the school.

Note: Upon receipt of the signup document, the COD team must complete a considerable setup process to establish the school in the COD test environment before testing can begin. This process may take several weeks to complete. Please take this setup process into account when planning your testing schedule.

You can find complete school testing instructions in the School Testing Guide, Volume 7 of the 2004-2005 COD Technical Reference (available at: http://www.fsadownload.ed.gov).

If you have questions regarding school testing you may contact the COD School Relations Center at 800/848-0978 and ask for COD School Testing Support Team. Email requests can be sent to CODsupport@acs-inc.com with the subject line "COD School Testing Support."

Thank you for your ongoing partnership in the Direct Loan Program.

Sincerely,

Jane Holman
Acting Director, Title IV Delivery
Schools Channel