Streamline your Workday testing using automation

For most deployments, testing activities consume 50 percent or more of your timeline. While we’ve seen success in following Workday’s core methodology, shifting testing timelines left and introducing it very early on during customer confirmation of tenant requirements, it does not reduce the overall testing effort. Add on employee and business lifecycles and the need to respond to day-to-day production issues, and customers can find themselves in search of a tool that relieves some of the testing burden.

One of the challenges is that test automation assumes that requirements are defined and the tenant is somewhat stable. However, testing in a constantly changing environment as customers work to define their requirements can be challenging. Add on the complexity of integration development and everchanging Workday releases, and the thought of automated testing as a possibility seems implausible.   

After considering the expansion of Alight’s own custom Selenium tools and various tools in the market, Alight formed a partnership with RapidIT Cloudbera’s Genie that makes this type of automated testing possible for our customers.

Finding the right testing tool

Alight has supported our clients with custom Selenium framework through our Testing as a Service (TaaS) offering for 60+ clients across North America and Europe. While our developed solution meets the needs of our customers who look to outsource release testing, clients who were looking to more highly leverage their own testers needed a more commercial product that included various features and capabilities, including:

“Plug-and-play” capabilities for business process testing
Having access to thousands of pre-populated test scenarios across both HCM and FINs gives the ability to quickly implement new scripts, SKUs and features without the need to code.

Support for true integration testing
Our customers needed the ability to launch integrations as well as validate, fit, form and execute scenario-based testing.

The ability to execute end-to-end testing
Individual business process tests and integrations can be combined to create test packages, providing full coverage of the end to end lifecycle testing.

Leveraging process automation
Automation features to schedule and execute repetitive tasks in Workday and can be used to handle routine data entry.

Contains built in comparison capabilities
Regression testing is not just about executing a business process or launching an integration. In many cases, it’s about comparing data or results between tenants (Sandbox versus Sandbox Preview) to ensure that the integrity of a file or report is not compromised. Report and integration comparisons in your lower environments make it easier to stay abreast of periodic Workday updates.

Through this partnership, we have not only been able create a cost structure that is cost effective for smallest deployment, but to also anticipate the needs of our customers through these key features:

Benefits of automating testing

Customers who leverage automation during the deployment can look forward to three key benefits:

Reduced testing fatigue
Few customers deploying Workday will have fully dedicated resources to only focus on testing. Customer resources generally have a day job where supporting production is the priority. By leveraging automation, customers can expect to reduce the amount of transactional data entry needed for testing by quickly automating those high-volume business processes. These business processes can be scheduled to run so there is always test data ready to validate at the start of each testing day.

Increased test coverage to reduce risk
High-volume testing results in higher confidence of the overall solution and reduces overall risk. Clients who leverage automation can test for the various permutations and worker combinations without creating the strain on manual testing. Additional tests like negative and exploratory testing are easily executed and can not only be repeated but scheduled.

Successful outcomes for your company
Most clients will experience their first Workday release within a few short months of stabilization. A natural progression of creating test coverage is to identify what can become a comprehensive regression test suite and eliminates the need to build a separate regression test plan each release.

Define your strategy

As we continue to partner with customers to strategically introduce automation into deployments, we’ve identified valuable best practices.

Avoid the urge to automate every business process up front
Identify the high-volume transactional business processes needed to support testing. Focusing on high-volume transactions eliminates tedious data entry tasks for your team and allows them to focus on ensuring that overall testing objectives are completed.

Consider security and access
One of the strategic elements of your automation test plan should be to validate not only what each role in your tenant can do, but what specific roles can view in the tenant. Often times testers will validate from their own perspective, but fail to confirm what other roles outside of their own can view. Automated tools like Genie can be used to validate during and post deployment that your intended security remains intact and worker or financial data is not compromised.

Prioritize integrations
Spend the time to develop an automated script for every integration up front. Not only will you be well positioned to execute a comprehensive test during your deployment, but you will be positioned well for your first release and beyond. Integrations are by far one of the more impacted components of the release.

Want to learn more? View our product sheet on Alight's testing services below.