Benefits and Limitations of FSIO Testing

This is intended to provide summary information about the Core Financial Management System (FMS) Qualification Test of commercial off the shelf (COTS) software. Specifically, these questions and answers describe the benefits and limitations of the testing process.

How do agencies benefit from the testing process?

FSIO serves as a focal point to leverage federal resources in the test of FMS for the benefit of all departments and agencies. Accordingly, the government achieves efficiencies by having a dedicated body that manages the process of defining, interpreting, maintaining, and testing government-wide core financial system requirements on behalf of all agencies. This process:

• Promotes consistency across the government. It identifies and requires a set of “branded” functional core requirements used by all stakeholders. The testing process is designed to be comprehensive, traceable (to core requirements) and transparent.
• Clearly communicates the baseline (minimum) functionality that software packages must support in order to enter the federal market. This approach helps organize the private sector COTS market to meet federal requirements and allows individual agencies to focus on their specific needs when evaluating commercial products.
• Allows the government to gather information in one central location about the COTS offerings, including how the COTS was “configured” to demonstrate compliance with the core requirements.
• Requires periodic testing of COTS products. It is not a “one-time” test. This helps ensure that the software offerings remain up to date with changing functional requirements with minimal cost to the government. This should also minimize the need for customization of the COTS.

• Perform due diligence in evaluating the “best fit” among potential products to their specific needs. Each COTS product, while meeting the basic core requirements, has its own strengths and weaknesses, such as number of keystrokes to complete a transaction and “user friendliness”, which may impact ultimate success in day-to-day operation.
• Consider how the qualified packages meet their own “agency- specific” requirements in addition to the mandatory FSIO core requirements.
• Assess the suitability of an FMS application for the agency’s operating environment. Agencies differ dramatically in size, budgetary resources, and business practices. Agencies need to consider the impact of the COTS products on the existing environment.
• Assess the COTS computing performance in the agency’s system environment for response time and transaction throughput capacity, especially when an agency has large volumes of transaction data.
• Complete a series of tests prior to system implementation. Agencies need to test the installed configured system to ensure continued compliance with both the government-wide core requirements and any agency-specific requirements. Also, agencies need to test for volume and performance characteristics prior to live operation.

	FSIO is committed to Section 508 compliance and accessibility of websites. We welcome you to contact us with any ideas or comments that may help us improve upon the accessibility and usability of our website. View the FSIO Privacy Statement
	USAGov: The U.S. Government Homepage
FINANCIAL SYSTEMS INTEGRATION OFFICE 1800 F St. N.W., Rm 1234 Washington DC 20405