Your technology environment probably looks very different today than it did when Worksoft 12.x was first introduced.

SAP programs have moved forward, cloud applications have become part of everyday operations, and critical business processes now stretch across more systems and teams. Releases are happening more often, but the expectation has not changed: the business still needs everything to work when those changes reach production.

That puts testing teams in a difficult position. You are being asked to support more change, provide answers more quickly, and give the business greater confidence, often without additional time or resources.

Moving to Worksoft 2026 gives you an opportunity to rethink how your automation program supports that reality. It is not simply about moving to a newer version of the software. It is about making it easier to understand where change creates risk, keep automation working, focus testing where it matters, and give decision-makers clearer evidence that the business is ready to move forward.

Here are 10 reasons to start planning your next steps.

1. Keep Testing in Step With the Business

The pace of change has increased but testing windows have not necessarily grown with it.

Your teams may be supporting SAP modernization, regular application updates, cloud migrations, and several transformation programs at the same time. When testing is still organized around large, isolated regression cycles, it can become increasingly difficult to keep up.

Worksoft 2026 gives you a more connected way to manage testing as change moves through the business. You can bring together information about what has changed, which processes could be affected, what needs to be tested, and what the results mean.

That makes testing easier to align with the rhythm of modern delivery. Instead of becoming a final hurdle before release, it can provide useful evidence throughout the change process and help teams move forward with greater confidence.

2. Put Your Time Into the Areas That Carry the Most Risk

Not every application change deserves the same level of attention.

A small technical adjustment may have little effect on day-to-day operations, while another change could influence order management, payroll, finance, supply chain, or customer service. The difficulty is understanding that difference before you commit time and resources to testing.

Worksoft 2026 helps you connect SAP changes to the business processes they may affect. This gives your team a clearer basis for deciding which tests need to run and where deeper validation may be required.

You are no longer relying solely on the size of a regression pack to create confidence. You can focus on the processes that matter most, explain why they were prioritized, and use your available testing capacity more effectively.

The benefit is not simply that you run fewer tests. It is that the tests you do run are more closely connected to the risk the business is trying to manage.

3. Spend More Time Improving Automation and Less Time Repairing It

Automation estates naturally become more difficult to manage as they grow.

Applications change, interfaces are updated, objects move, and small differences between environments can cause executions to fail. Your specialists may then spend hours working out whether a failure represents a genuine business issue or whether the automation itself needs attention.

Worksoft 2026 introduces AI-assisted capabilities that can help automation adjust to certain application changes and make failures easier to interpret. Clearer summaries and root-cause guidance can help your team understand what happened without beginning every investigation from scratch.

This does not replace the people who understand your applications and processes. It gives them better support, so more of their time can go toward extending coverage, improving automation quality, and helping the business prepare for upcoming change.

4. Stop Letting Test Data Hold Up the Schedule

Testing cannot begin without the right data, yet data preparation is often treated as something that happens outside the testing process.

Your team may need to find suitable records, create transactions manually, refresh environments, or wait for another department to provide what is needed. These delays can quietly consume a large part of the testing window before the first automated process has even run.

Worksoft 2026 brings test data provisioning closer to automation and execution. By making data easier to prepare and reuse, you can create more consistent testing cycles and reduce the number of manual steps required each time testing begins.

This gives your team a more reliable starting point. It can also improve the quality of the results because the tests are running with data that better reflects the scenarios you need to validate.

5. Validate the Process the Way the Business Experiences It

The business does not experience SAP, a web application, and a cloud service as separate technical systems. It experiences a complete process.

An employee joins the company. A customer places an order. A supplier is paid. Inventory moves from one location to another. Each of those journeys may pass through several applications before it is complete.

Testing individual systems can tell you whether each component works on its own, but it may not reveal what happens when information and activity move between them.

Worksoft 2026 helps you coordinate testing across the full business process, allowing you to validate the journey from beginning to end. That gives you a better chance of finding the gaps that appear between applications, integrations, teams, and process steps.

For the business, that is often the difference between a technically successful release and one that works properly in the real world.

6. Give Leaders a Clearer View of Readiness

Testing teams often have plenty of data. The harder part is turning it into information that helps someone make a decision.

Executives and transformation leaders rarely need another detailed execution report. They need to understand whether the most important processes are protected, where risk remains, and whether the organization is ready to release.

Worksoft 2026 provides stronger reporting and visibility across your automation environment. This allows you to look beyond individual pass-and-fail results and understand patterns across processes, releases, and testing cycles.

You can give stakeholders a clearer view of:

• where failures are concentrated;
• which processes may need additional attention;
• how automation is performing over time; and
• whether the available evidence supports a release decision.

This helps testing become part of the business conversation around readiness and risk, rather than remaining a technical activity that is difficult for others to interpret.

7. Make Quality Part of the Way Change is Delivered

Testing is much more effective when it is connected to the tools and processes used to manage change.

When requirements sit in one system, defects in another, executions somewhere else, and results are shared manually, teams lose time joining the information together. Important context can also disappear as work passes from one group to the next.

Worksoft 2026 connects with widely used SAP, DevOps, and application lifecycle management tools. This allows testing activity and evidence to move more naturally through the delivery process.

For your teams, that can mean fewer manual handoffs, less duplicated work, and better visibility from planning through release. It also creates opportunities to identify risk earlier, while there is still time to respond without putting the release schedule under unnecessary pressure.

8. Protect the Investment You Have Already Made

Your existing automation is more than a collection of tests.

It reflects years of business knowledge, technical expertise, process decisions, and effort from people across the organization. As your application environment evolves, you want that investment to continue delivering value rather than becoming something you need to rebuild.

Worksoft 2026 expands support for modern SAP experiences, browsers, web technologies, and connected enterprise applications. Improvements to object recognition and execution resilience help existing automation remain useful as the systems around it change.

This gives you a stronger foundation for modernization. You can build on the work already completed while gradually extending automation into new processes, applications, and business areas.

9. Make Automation Easier to Scale and Govern

The needs of a small automation team are very different from those of a program used across several regions, departments, or transformation initiatives.

As more people use the platform, access, administration, security, and consistency become more important. Without the right controls, growth can create unnecessary complexity for users and administrators alike.

Worksoft 2026 introduces more modern authentication and security capabilities, helping the platform align with the identity and access standards already used across your organization.

This can make access simpler for users while giving administrators greater control over how the platform is managed. It also creates a more stable foundation for expanding automation without introducing a different process or set of rules for every team that comes on board.

10. Prepare for More Than the Next Release

The next SAP program, cloud migration, or application update will not be the last major change your organization needs to support.

AI-enabled processes, new enterprise technologies, and more frequent release models will continue to reshape how the business operates. Your testing platform needs to be able to evolve alongside those changes.

Worksoft 2026 provides a more modern foundation for deployment, integration, security, automation, and future upgrades. The move therefore gives you more than access to new capabilities today. It helps put your testing program in a stronger position for what comes next.

That matters because testing should not become another constraint on transformation. It should help the business understand change, manage risk, and move forward with confidence.

Give Yourself Time to Plan the Move Properly

Support for Worksoft 12.x ends on December 31, 2026, but that does not mean you need to rush into an upgrade without preparation.

Starting now gives you time to understand your current environment, review dependencies, assess the automation you already have, and involve the right technical and business stakeholders. It also allows you to consider what you want to improve as part of the move, rather than treating it as a simple version change.

A useful starting point is to look at:

• the size and condition of your current automation estate;
• the applications, integrations, and teams that depend on it;
• any technical or infrastructure changes required; and
• the business programs the upgraded platform will need to support.

Approaching the move in this way helps turn a support deadline into an opportunity to create a more focused, resilient, and valuable automation program.

Worksoft 2026 can help you build on the investment you have already made while giving your teams better ways to understand risk, manage change, and demonstrate business readiness.

Ready to start planning your move beyond Worksoft 12.x?

Schedule an Upgrade Planning Session