Streamline your Workday testing using automation

For most deployments, manual testing activities consume 75% of a program timeline, with more than half of that time requiring 100% resource effort from your employees. Add on employee and business lifecycles and the need to respond to day-to-day production issues, users will find themselves in search of a tool that relieves that testing burden.

Challenges faced with test automation is that it assumes requirements are defined and the tenant is stable. However, testing in a flucuating environment as customers work to define their requirements show to be difficult at times. Add on the complexity of integration development and everchanging Workday releases, the thought of automated testing as a possibility seems implausible.   

With all this in mind, we found a solution to make automated testing possible for our Workday customers. Alight's Workday Automated Testing powered by Kainos helps to create maintainable processes with less resources, while also mitigating risk.

With Alight's Workday Automated Testing, you can expect to leverage 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.