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6 Questions To Ask Your Automated Testing Vendor Before Purchasing
The pace and complexity of today’s IT landscapes make manual testing an option that’s challenging at best and downright impossible for many enterprises. There simply are not enough time, cost, and staff resources to make manual testing a viable option for projects both large and small. Automated testing can deliver many benefits vs. manual testing, but to ensure automation return on investment, you need to choose the right solution.
Before investing in a test automation platform for your packaged applications and beyond, ask these six questions to determine the scope of the value the test automation tool can bring to your organization.
Engaging automation is supposed to make your operation more efficient, right? So you don’t want to choose a test automation solution that requires programming or a heavy lift to set up. Instead, choose a code-free automation platform that you can use to start de-risking your operation right away.
With Worksoft, customers can go from zero to automation faster than any other industry solution. Unlike testing tools that require proprietary programming knowledge, there’s no steep learning curve with our codeless platform. Just premium usability to drive value from the start. In addition to codeless testing, our Process Capture technology lets you engage business users in process discovery, capturing their step-by-step tasks to create a digital record that can be used to quickly build automation, as well as generate automated documentation for compliance, migration planning, and more.
“We actually had the solution itself up and running within a week, because the Worksoft platform is very lean in terms of infrastructure and very rich in functionality.” —Shahed Bashir, ERP Project Delivery and Solution Governance Manager, Johnson Matthey
2. Does it Support Digital Transformation?
With a focus on digital transformation, enterprises are facing a rapidly growing need to keep adopting new technologies, while simultaneously ensuring zero defects as critical business processes and the systems they depend on evolve continuously.
Ideally, an automated testing solution will empower you to accelerate digital transformation, streamlining major migrations efforts like a shift to SAP S/4HANA or an upgrade to Oracle EBS 12.1. Even the adoption of Agile+DevOps methodologies can be supported by engaging continuous test automation for regression testing and other key components of CI/CD.
Worksoft customers experience testing cycles that are up to 90% faster than manual testing, which allows them to speed project timelines and major migrations without sacrificing quality.
“We kicked off our SAP S/4HANA conversion in July of 2020. We had an estimated go-live of around January 2021. We were actually able to realize our go live much sooner. One of the big factors that allowed us to realize that was the fact that we had automated a lot of the testing.” –Christopher Pete, Director of Computer Services, Ariel Corporation
3. How Does it Adapt to Change?
Technology changes fast. Frequent software release cycles, evolving customer demands, and competitive pressure for relentless innovation all drive persistent and pervasive change in your IT environment. And even the smallest change can have a significant impact on the continuity of your business processes. That’s why it’s important that your automation not only supports defect resolution but that the automation itself can adapt easily to change.
With Worksoft, enterprises maintain complex automation without the pain of resource-draining rework. Our platform uses a patented Object Action Framework to extract every application it interacts with into a set of defined objects and attributes, which are stored in a database to support machine learning which automatically matches new objects to the appropriate object type. These objects are separate from the automation steps and it’s easy to replicate a change wherever objects are used, rather than having to manually update every instance of a change.
“With the object action framework, a single update proliferates across the entire set of automation. One update to one object fixes thousands of steps in a hundred different processes. And you don't have to worry about going back and looking at everything. It's just done automatically, dynamically and consistently over and over again.”
-Shoeb Javed, Chief Product & Strategy Officer, Worksoft
4. Is it Scalable?
Whether it’s user acceptance testing, functional testing, regression testing, or others, your organization is doing some type of testing all of the time. But building and rebuilding test scripts for automation over and over is inefficient and dilutes the value of automating testing. Automation yields the greatest return on investment when you can create reusable assets that can be shared across projects, teams and departments to support scalable, enterprise-wide value.
With Worksoft’s Connective Automation Platform, code-free objects are captured and stored in a repository of reusable assets, saving time and increasing accuracy and consistency for business process testing.
“You don’t want to create a script and have to throw it away at the end of the project. You want to be able to use that script over and over again. If you do it properly, you can reuse your test scripts in production or in other processes. That's where the RPA part comes in and that's where the regression testing comes in. And it’s not just bing, bang, go and do a whole lot of things for one project and move forward and never use that automation again. That’s wasted time, energy and costs. We reuse automation constantly and it works really well.” – Euronica Oliver, senior QA manager, CHEP USA
5. Can it Support Cross-Application Testing?
Your business processes rarely exist in a single application. Your test automation shouldn’t either. Automate your processes the way they run in the real world—across packaged apps, custom apps, web apps and beyond.
Worksoft delivers the ability to test end-to-end business processes that span multiple applications, including ERP, mobile, web, and beyond. Instead of testing in siloed applications, we empower you to drive quality assurance, meet high expectations for end-user experiences, and ensure flawless delivery by testing horizontally across applications.
“We have clearly identified the benefits of utilizing automation. Overall quality has increased in production since fixes and change requests can be properly tested, utilizing our existing end-to-end test scenarios. Using those speeds up testing, and those are really important for test cases when we are testing across functional chains, where we have multiple integrations.” – Pia Hirvonen, IT Services Lead, Outokumpu
6. Can I Use it to Drive Process Improvement?
How do you choose what to automate and when? Do you know what the ideal process path is for your end-to-end business processes? In order to be successful, automation for both pre-production with test automation and for post-production with RPA requires a strong understanding of your business processes up front.
With seamless integration between process discovery, process mining, test automation and RPA, the Worksoft Connective Automation platform delivers a deeper understanding of business processes that can be used to make informed decisions about what to automate. Uncover process inefficiencies, challenges and root causes to support meaningful change. The platform’s Process Intelligence dashboard also tracks tangible business outcomes, creating a 360-degree view of your processes and the value you’re experiencing from automation.
“The Process Intelligence dashboard gives us a clear picture of our processes and their performance. With this
insight, we can literally see where the holes are. We also get suggestions of the actions we can take next, along with their related financial value. We can determine where to change, where to optimize, and where to automate for maximum returns.” – Process Intelligence beta customer
Test Automation should drive efficiency and increase quality, enabling your enterprise to ultimately experience tangible business benefits in the form of time, cost and resource savings. For information on how Worksoft delivers these results, use the resources below or download the new commissioned Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study conducted on behalf of Worksoft to examine the potential ROI organizations can realize with Worksoft.
