End-to-end Test Management Ensures Business Process Quality
In this webinar, you will learn how using a test management platform, where all ERP testing activities can be centrally managed, executed and tracked efficiently with real-time clear visibility, alleviates many of the testing challenges, and in many cases can reduce testing times by at least 30%.
In organizations, the initial focus to improve testing is usually mostly on technical testing. This might be due to the fact that this is closer to IT, doesn’t require significant involvement from the Business and it focuses on tools and less on change management.
This is suitable and even effective when the goal is to test performance, security, load or regression to some extent.
But what about the functional side of the testing?
Since it requires more interactions between the business and the IT, is labor intensive both for knowledge gathering and for test execution, functional and business process level testing haven’t been the main focus of improvement so far.
Without common failures in production, this wouldn’t be such a problem.
NYSE and United are examples of such failures. These failures occurred because of end to end business processes which were not tested before go live.
The NYSE example relates to a 3rd party which interacts with the core components. Some integration points were not tested and the failure was only found in production. Impact: 3.5 outage!
The United example relates to an end to end process which occurs when there is an error during the reservation process.
The happy path (reservation ok) was tested and not and the exception handling path. When an error occurred in production during the reservation process, they couldn’t get out of the exception handling process. As a result, planes were grounded worldwide for hours.
This is one of the reason why a paradigm shift is required in testing. Technical testing is not the remedy to all issues. Without proper business process testing, organizations will keep on suffering with such failures in production.
What testing solution are your end users using to report their test results
1 XLS
2 Panaya
3 HP ALM
3 Jira
4 Others
When we talk to our customers about what makes testing ERP a challenge in a modern software development lifecycle they came back with the following challenges across the planning, execution & management phases.
Traditional tools and methodologies are heavy to install, define and maintain. Testers are not anymore only professional testers. Functional analysts and business users are now key stakeholders in the testing process. However traditional tools and methodologies were not designed this new testers and hence the challenge to use office tools to support ever complex testing processes.
When using excel or similar workarounds to manage large scale testing cycles, it is very challenging to get real time visibility over the testing progress. It takes time to collect and aggregate the accurate picture and hence it is usually only done daily… if everything goes fine…
How can the managers know how things were tested? Should managers really rely on sign off emails and take the risk to go live? If users would have much more time to test, they would document all of their test execution to prove what they tested, how they tested it. Because of a lack of time, and also because this is not really pleasant, no thorough test evidence is created and hence a lack of visibility on test quality and accuracy.
Capturing business user knowledge is a challenge: it is labor intensive and requires a lot of coordination. This would have enabled more available resources to perform testing on their behalf. But this is never the right time to do it and even tough customer finally find the time to do it prior a major event in the organization, the business process documentation becomes very fast obsolete
Business process testing requires multiple users, each of them with their unique knowhow and authorizations, to go through each end to end business process. Because of a lack of collaboration tools, it is hard to really know when to test and what to test at any point of time. This leads to a lot of idle time between users who need to work sequentially and hence impacts productivity.
Are you facing additional challenges in Business Process testing?
Whether you perform maintenance or business driven changes, testing is always required.
Finding and applying good practices, suitable for the various stakeholders and which encourages reusability within the organization is critical to ensure high productivity and quality.
Positioning statement emphasizes on:
Integrated end to end testing: includes both test management, test execution, test documentation and defect management
Design for ERP: traditional testing tools are generic and mostly focusing on software developement
Functional testing as opposed to technical testing/performance/load/security testing
Even though we cover all the functional test cycles, the UAT (User Acceptance Testing) use case is one of our main differentiators against other solutions
Whether you perform maintenance or business driven changes, testing is always required.
Finding and applying good practices, suitable for the various stakeholders and which encourages reusability within the organization is critical to ensure high productivity and quality.
Panaya Test Center is a SaaS cloud-based testing solution for test and defect management covering the entire functional testing spectrum. Panaya Test Center accelerates end-to-end business process testing with automated test evidence and migration of test scenarios and effortless documentation cross applications. Panaya Test Center addresses the gaps that traditional testing tools create, offering both professional testers and business users a collaborative method of test management and execution with an intuitive dashboard, system wide defect management and automatic handover to ensure testing quality and accuracy. Panaya Test center is used to introduce innovation faster at over 200 global enterprises across leading verticals including utilities, oil and gas, retail, manufacturing and automotive.
In addition there are some components that you may want to talk about:
Defect management: far more than traditional defect management solutions, Panaya provides out of the box functionalities to best manage defects such as: auto documentation of the defects, system wide defects (prevent the inflation of defects during large scale projects), and a great integration with the testing workflow to better control what can be tested and when.
Test execution (Acceleration): we accelerate test acceleration by
Automating the testing workflow (“pass the baton”/ “automatic handover between testers”)
Automating the creation of test evidence
Automation in SAP ERP test execution
E-signature: enables regulated customers to sign electronically their test execution. It is not sufficient for strong FDA regulated customers using HP ALM but compared to MS Excel (often used in UAT cycles), that’s a great advantage!
Test box = automatic migration of the test scripts
Roadmap:
Web player: will provide automation also for web applications
Requirement traceability: will enable to import requirements, link to test cases and track traceability/coverage
Panaya Test Center functionality delivers
A solution to keeping the pace of businees
Faster TTM
Introducing new business innovation faster for a competitive edge
ROI is better than heavy solutions in place today.
Unique Advantages:
100% SaaS: no installation, ready to go. Most of our customers like the ability to consume the service quickly with no setup / preparation whatsoever
Quick on boarding: the interface is user friendly and easy to use. The onboarding time of a user is very quick. A casual tester can be up and running with Panaya within 30 minutes.
Automated Test Evidence: Panaya provides the ability to document test runs automatically, on the ERP, web applications and all windows applications.
Effortless Documentation: business process documentation can be either generated based on actual test evidences or recorded from scratch
Intuitive dashboards and reporting: we provide out of the box dashboards and reports to track business process testing (not generic testing progress)
Automatic migration of your Word and Excel test scripts: we care about the time it takes you to move from your legacy to Panaya and hence making the migration of your test scripts our problem! (the reasoning behind it is that business process testing has very common patterns which enabled us to build automation around it)
Designed for Business Users: Casual business users have never been the main persona covered by traditional testing solutions. Panaya designed the solution to be used by casual users with an easy to use interface, making sure that the onboarding is quick and the user experience is great.
What is the next improvement that you want to bring to your test strategy
1 – I don’t have a test strategy yet, we should build one
2 – Improve Test Data Management
3 – Get more adoption by business users to our current testing solution
4 – Develop more test automation
We will wait a few moments allow everyone to answer the question
What you see here is a typical process in business applications: Jenny is a key user. Part of her job description is to request and test functionality changes in the Supplier Relationship Management system. Due to segregation of duties and business knowhow, she can only test the creation of a shopping cart and the subsequent purchase order. Then she needs to pass the baton to John to approve the purchase order in the ERP system. From there Peter and Mary will continue the integration test until it is completely passed.
Q: are you also performing this type of testing?
Many customers would actually manage the testing of these business processes with MS-Office documents.
Each step describing the activity to be tested at high level together with the team or the tester who need to perform it.
Q: is that also the way you describe your business processes?
A test cycle will usually contain hundreds of such, and therefore this is how the test management platform will looks like.
(Some customers may find ways to collaborate on a single file simultaneously but the planning and the execution phases of a test cycle still remain very cumbersome. )
Q: does this look familiar?
These are the challenges that we identified among our customers, which are managing their testing in this manner
They usually complain about the Poor visibility & control they have over testing because it takes a lot of time to collect all the information coming from all these documents and understand where you are in real time
They also complain about the Idle time between testers. Even though it might take only few minutes to test each of the transaction it may take hours or even days between the test of two different steps (until the first tester will document the test results and will notify the next tester that he can continue the business process)
Also when you ask people to document their own tests and to write down a lot of information that will be helpful for the next tester this requires a lot of Bureaucracy for the users. They will spend a lot of time documenting the process rather than spending time finding defects in the application or validating that the new functionality is delivered correctly
Some customers to overcome these type of challenges will actually fly people to the same location in order to perform the testing, which will lead to a certain cost (Time & Cost of flying testers to the same location) in each of the test cycles that is required, and performing these type of activities too often would even lead to a lack of time from the business users.
Q: are you also experiencing some of these challenges? Is there any other challenge that you are facing?
Would you like a Panaya representative to contact you for your own personal demo?
We will wait a few moments allow everyone to answer the question…