Continual testing of Workday’s functionality, integrations and performance, is key for any business hoping to leverage the benefits of this enterprise platform.
You will have been through rigorous UAT testing to develop and implement your tenant at go-live. You may even have explored automating some test routines. So why Automated Testing? In short, it reduces the level of UAT engagement needed and significantly increases the speed at which new features, security groups and assignments can be tested across multiple roles and locations.
You are live on Workday, why do you need to test?
With Workday the need to test never stops, whether it’s:
- Post Implementation remediation
- Enhancements to business processes and security
- Integration monitoring and e2e performance with other complementary systems
- Regular new releases of Workday and upgrades to existing releases
Remediation: Post go-live you will be faced with circumstances where not all your business-critical processes are working as intended; or Security groups not delivering data and functionality as designed; or integrations that are failing. Testing in sandbox will be necessary before you promote any changes to production.
Enhancements: Your configuration and processes will need to respond to business developments. Whether purely optimising performance over time, or delivering new business processes to meet business growth, testing becomes a central element to this.
Integrations: How are these being monitored for performance and GDPR concerns? How will they cope with new or revised vendor platforms or with changes to in-house systems? Only testing will ensure that you can mitigate these risks and ensure business continuity.
Frequent Updates and new Releases of Workday: You will need to have in place robust regression testing to ensure that Workday’s update didn’t damage any of your business-critical processes. In the case of new releases – even if you choose to ignore any new features – there is a danger that the new release could unexpectedly impact your business processes.
Testing provides the QA that your business processes, integrations, security, and reports are working as you designed and are still meeting business requirements. So how should you perform your testing?
How to test Workday?
To automate or not to automate?
Regression testing routines are a prime opportunity to apply automated testing as it enables you to quickly absorb new releases and updates into your live environment. Manual UAT testing is time and resource intensive. As a result it has to be limited and risk-based. Automation, allows you to increase the speed, range and reliability of your test cases by running multiple test routines in parallel and at scale.
Many implementations involve complex conditionality, specific to country location, with appropriate security group limitations on data access. Testing all of these manually is not possible during the time window available for an upgrade or new release. So test automation makes sense if you need to:
- Significantly reduce the time and resources required with Workday deployments
- Enhance your processes in response to business developments and growth
- Have confidence in mitigating your business continuity and data leakage risks
How will you automate tests in Workday?
This all depends on your circumstances. Your business context, business critical processes and integration architecture will influence what can be deployed where. The key question is will you build a solution in-house or will you utilize a vendor solution?
There are a lot of pre-built options available in the market, so will you want to deploy your budget and resources to build the same.
Other key questions to consider:
- Do you need to run your test scenarios across multiple systems, cloud and on-premise, in order to ensure business continuity?
- Do you need to engage vendor system resources to run your test routines?
A managed service provider skilled in automated testing can quickly identify what is possible in your system environment. They can also advise on those critical points in test scenarios where human eyesight and judgement is still necessary. Test Automation reduces the level of UAT engagement needed; significantly increases the speed at which new features, security groups and assignments can be tested across multiple roles and locations; and crucially will provide the level of quality assurance necessary to prove mitigation of data leakage and business continuity risks.
LogicaCloud understands the complexity of what you are facing. Our team is expert in design, implementation and analysis of automated test routines.
For a purely exploratory and cost-free conversation with one of our experienced test automation professionals, contact us here.