NRECA National Test Agency for Certification of Distribution Software
Project Objective
Compliance and Interoperability Testing of Vendor Software Packages to Certify Conformance with MultiSpeak.
Project Scope
MultiSpeak® is a software specification designed to help small electric utilities, such as electric cooperatives, automate their business processes and exchange data among software applications. The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA), in collaboration with leading vendors of electric utility software, sponsors the MultiSpeak initiative. As a part of the initiative, NRECA makes available a software testing service. UISOL was selected as the National Testing Agent for MultiSpeak, performing the software testing service on behalf of NRECA.
There are two main types of tests that UISOL performs, compliance testing and interoperability testing. Compliance testing seeks to verify that the vendor software imports and exports the data required and in the format defined by the specification, which is based on XML Schemas. Software may be tested for batch compliance, web services compliance, or both. Interoperability testing seeks to verify that two pieces of software, probably from different vendors, interact in such a manner as to provide some useful business function for an electric utility using MultiSpeak-defined functionality.
Services Provided by UISOL
- Perform MultiSpeak compliance tests and document the results of those tests
- Perform MultiSpeak interoperability tests and document the results of those tests
- Work with software vendors to schedule tests and exchange test data
- Develop and maintain test procedures
- Modification of sample test data as required
List of Systems
- Systems UISOL tests include systems providing any of the MultiSpeak functions, which are:
- Customer Billing
- Connect / Disconnect / Power Limitation
- Call Handling
- Customer Relationship Management
- GIS
- Engineering Analysis
- Finance and Accounting
- Load Management
- Load Profile
- Meter Reading
- Outage Detection & Analysis
- SCADA