VIA Rail Canada is an independent Crown corporation established in 1978. VIA operates trains in all regions of Canada over a network spanning the country from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Great Lakes to Hudson Bay.  Serving 4.1 million passengers annually, with a staff numbering over 3,000, running 480 trains per week (including 300 in southern Quebec and southern Ontario), VIA  trains run over 14,000 km of track serving some 450 Canadian communities.

Project Summary

Managed functional testing and quality assurance of a Voice Processing and response System (VPS).

Background

VIA had contracted with a software integration company to implement a VPS application to deliver customer self service access to train schedules, fare inquiries, passenger reservations and real-time arrival information acquired from Philips. This system had never been deployed in North America and so was groundbreaking.

Requirement

Ensure speech recognition would be sufficiently accurate to generate traffic from the public to reduce call centre call traffic, saving costs and increasing service response of a Voice Processing and Response system.

Approach

Facilitated the development of VIA acceptance criteria and reported against attainment. Defined objective acceptance criteria for speak recognition levels, functionality, performance and availability.

Using the Functional Requirements, developed test scenarios, use cases, data and scripts to test the logic, speech recognition capabilities and performance.

Managed the testing process including:

• Defined test documentation and scoring process
• Staffing, training and monitoring of test activities
• Assessed and scored results
• Reported test results to VIA management, suppliers and development team
• Retested after changes, modifications, upgrades, fixes, etc.
• Facilitated negotiations for changes to requirements, systems or testing