Real Users Share the Value of Business Application Testing that Spans Your Entire IT Landscape

When people talk about digital transformation, what they are partly referring to is a transformation in the relationship between IT and the business. Everything is moving faster. Business stakeholders have ever-changing requirements for enterprise applications. IT is responsible for keeping the apps up and running—and working the way they’re meant to in complex, orchestrated business process workflows from start to finish. This means a lot of testing. Today, IT departments are turning to automated, end-to-end testing solutions to keep everything on track. 

This blog post explores some of the benefits of the end-to-end approach to business application testing. It is based on real user reviews of Worksoft Certify published on IT Central Station. Except where noted, the reviewers work at organizations with more than 10,000 employees.

End-to-End Testing Use Cases

IT Central Station members are employing end-to-end testing in a range of application testing scenarios. We use it for end-to-end testing of packaged applications,” explained Manuel H., a Senior Consultant at a tech vendor. He said, “The products and systems that we get are usually preconfigured and prepackaged and we do additional testing, not just for the functionality for the coding that we add to the product, but also on the prepackaged solutions.” In particular, his team conducts web-UI testing.

Testing of SAP applications is where Piyush L. uses Certify. He is an SQA Test Automation Lead at CHEP USA, a logistics company with over 5,000 employees. He shared, “We use Worksoft Certify for end-to-end regression and integration testing across our systems.” Santhi G., a Testing & Quality Assurance Manager at Johnson Matthey, a pharma/biotech company, uses Worksoft Certify to run automated weekly regression tests across some of their primary SAP systems in line with the company’s Change and Release management strategy. She remarked that “these tests run every weekend without fail. The results are reviewed on every Monday morning to check for failures and to analyze if any failures are associated with the changes scheduled to be transported to the production environment that week.”

Empowering Non-Coders

One major benefit highlighted by Certify users was the solution’s ability to empower non-coders to do end-to-end testing and feel comfortable with the testing process. For instance, according to Judy Z., a Manager of QA at United Technologies, “You don’t need programming skills, which is why the adoption rate is so much higher.” She then added, “With SAP, Worksoft works seamlessly. We can record the steps, harden the script and we’re good to go. One of the big advantages of Worksoft is it’s very user-friendly. The test steps are written in English where anybody can logically look at them and figure out what the steps are doing. It’s very easy to cut, paste, insert, and delete.”

A System Engineer at a transportation company similar commented that Certify's testing process “is easily adoptable.” He said, “I don’t need to hire a highly skilled/trained person to learn it. For other tools, personnel need to be very professional and need to know how to use that tool beforehand, but very little education or help is required here. They can easily adopt and trigger the automation.” As a result, as he shared, “The product has saved us time by not needing highly skilled people, since it is hard to retain experienced development resources. Once we train our functional testers who are running the automation, they can the tool well and stable.”

Saving Time

“It has absolutely enabled us to automate and save time, said a QA Manager at a manufacturing company with more than 1,000 employees. “The weekly imports of the changes allow the developers to plan on a weekly cycle, which increases the speed of their development. They don’t have to wait for a release or anything else, they can test their changes quickly and get the results the next day. They know that they’re able to import with no problem.” For this company, the savings was not just measured in time. He added, “That one defect we found easily saved us $1,000,000. That was just one. Over the years, the amount of money that it has saved us is certainly in that range.”

Other insights about the time-saving potential of end-to-end testing included:

  • “Worksoft Certify helped us to increase time savings. We didn’t start test automation in general with Worksoft Certify. We did automation before with our own tool, but it helped us to increase the coverage of test automation and to increase the time savings. We had a success story with two teams. For the execution of the scripts, we had time savings of 82, 88, 95, and 90 percent. And for the speed, it was between nine and 21 times faster than manual execution.” – Senior IT Director at the world's leading enterprise resource planning software vendor headquartered in Germany  
  • “This solution has enabled our clients to automate and save time (approximately 40 to 50 percent). The product has saved our clients’ money” – Principal Consultant ERP at a tech services company 
  • “This solution has enabled us to automate in order to tremendously save time. Only [during the] first time when you are recording and creating the script will you spend some time with it, the rest of the time, you are just executing. If we do one manual process, it could take approximately two hours. The same process using Worksoft probably takes ten minutes.” – SAP Configuration ERP II at an energy/utilities company with over 5,000 employees 
  • “In three months, we created 1000 scripts with Worksoft. When the three years before with eCut, we did 450 scripts. This is where we saw a difference.” – Oliver H., a VP Test and Quality Management at Deutche Telecom

Euronica O., a Quality Assurance Manager at CHEP, shared multiple quantifiable time savings from the use of Certify for end-to-end testing. She has used automation to reduce about 75 percent of the time when compared to other tools. She noted, “The changes for Worksoft used the same script as the script automating UFT. Manually, running our tool takes about 4 hours, but with Worksoft, we were able to do it in less than 30 minutes. Whereas, the same thing that you had to do would take you almost 55 minutes to an hour. There is now a 50 percent savings in terms of other automation tools and an 85 percent savings in terms of manual to automation.”

Automating Manual Tests

Being able to automate end-to-end testing stands out as a major benefit. “Successful implementation and execution of Worksoft Certify tests has been faster than execution of the tests manually,” commented a QA Developer II at a university. He also shared that, “with other tools, it was hard to get successful technical execution right quickly. Automation is not easy. Worksoft Certify makes it easier yet flexible enough to handle some of the most complex automation tasks. Every time steps are automated, test execution times are reduced and application problems are identified faster.”

Automation benefited the work of Santhi G., a Testing & Quality Assurance Manager at Johnson Matthey, a pharma/biotech company. As she put it, “We have this reusable asset now which can be run frequently to support all our projects and change requests across our legacy SAP systems. Even last-minute testing requests are being accommodated by utilizing the automated regression suite without any dependency on business users/functional users for their efforts.” 

Jesse Blakemore an Associate Manager Intelligent Testing at Accenture, credited Certify’s codeless capabilities with improved software testing automation. He said, “Worksoft Certify’s codeless scripting appeals along with the use of the Capture feature which helps in those initial phases. It also helps to translate the business requirements to the automation team. If there’s a separate team, this is a little better too.” An IT Automation Specialist at an energy/utilities company with more than 1,000 employees simply stated, “It is not heavily code-based, so you can pick it up and automate very quickly.”

Want to learn more? Download End-to-End Testing Automation Essentials on DZone.

To read full reviews, visit the Worksoft Certify end-to-end testing page on IT Central Station.