Worksoft Certify Reviews

The primary use case is to automate their SAP and Web applications. We use Worksoft Certify for end-to-end regression and integration testing across our systems.

It helps us to implement automation testing as part of most projects, so the need for manual testing can be reduced. This really accelerates the testing process as a whole. Before, where it could take ten days to test a project, now it takes only one or two days to do the complete testing. So, it helps us to reduce our testing timelines.

We no longer need ten people sitting and manually testing something. We can just have one person running the entire regression automation testing suite, and this has saved us dollars.

I have found Capture 2.0 helpful compared to Capture 1.0. It allows you to have access to all the screenshots when you use it so you see what steps you are capturing, and if you are capturing it right or not. It is very user-friendly.

It is easy to use and learn the application. For example, I have an intern who joined me three months ago. Today, she delivers the same number of scripts as my experienced developers with great quality.

One feature that could be added to Capture 2.0 is generating a PDF file from your capture, so you can see your screenshots and steps. This will really help teams leverage the documents generated as part of requirement/training.

Right now, when we do regression testing, we manually have to generate all the reports and populate all the results in HP ALM. We really are looking for a solution to have send all the results to HP ALM once Execution Manager completes the execution, then automatically logs them.

Our offshore teams experience a lag/delay when using the Worksoft interface. As of now we use VPN and Remote Desktop to help us with this issues, it was be great to see how much Certify 11 has improved in terms to offshore accessibility.

Every time there is a new release of Worksoft, they present it in a conference. However, there is no training document nor one point of solution where I one see what new changes/feature have been implemented, like a portal. If I don't know how to use a feature, there is no training nor documentation available. When you reach out for support, it takes time for them to research it and get back to us.

I would like more use cases or at least a weekly email update to all the customers saying, "These are new features which have been included in the last week." That would really help.

Worksoft with SAP is pretty stable. 

When it comes to the web, you need a lot of extra effort in making sure that the tests are maintained, but that is the nature of the web application. You have stuff that is changing all the time, so you have to ensure that you maintain your tests regularly.

We have learned the scalability part over time. We were very successful with SAP, but not very successful with the web. Over the period of about two years, we were able to prove to our company that we can use Worksoft for different type of applications. While there is a learning curve, it is all about trying things out and failing few times before you get a success.

I would rate the technical support as a seven out of ten. There is a delay in time zones when we reach out to them. The response is not as quick as we expect it to be with the other solutions that we have. There is definitely a delay in timing, as the speed is lacking.

The initial setup was easy. We had all the information and the requirements that we needed to do the prep work before doing the implementation.

We have Worksoft help us each time that we do an upgrade or implementation. Our  upgrades have gone smoothly.

An example of saving time and dollars: We had project going on that used to require manual testing. The first time that they did manual regression testing, we had a group of about 15 testers who sat in our office for a period of two weeks to do the testing. Now, when we have to regression testing with automation scripts ready in our Worksoft Certify, we do it in a day or two. 

We looked at quite a few vendors and automation tools in the market. We chose Worksoft because of the ease of use and mentorship support they provide in making sure we were successful.

For a new customer who is to implement Worksoft Certify, I would suggest 'Start the right way'. Have a Worksoft mentor come in and help you with your automation journey specific to your organization so you can have expert support until you become successful with it. Once you are successful, you'll know what to do. E.g., we had a team of interns who got trained and they tried to work with it, but it did not work. Then, we had Worksoft help us (after two years), and it worked. 

My team and I do the regression testing. We are a team of three to four people. We are not working on just one project, we are working on five or six different projects.

What's next, well I hope we are able to present that next success story in next conference ;)

We have been working on test automation for SAP-based platform for the last 15 years and leveraging Worksoft for SAP test automation in last 10 years. 

We have some fantastic use cases on how we can leverage Worksoft in large SAP transformation programs, especially for major global rollouts. If you look at some of the industries, like retail and logistics, we can see a lot of consolidation. When there is consolidation, we need to merge two SAP landscapes to a single landscape instance. It is a very complex transformation program. The testing is labor-intensive work in such a large scale IT landscape program. Worksoft has played a key role in delivering these complex integration programs on time, because we automated the core processes using Worksoft Certify. This helped us to automate the testing scenarios in new companies being integrated. At the same time, we test the existing company codes on the existing landscape to ensure that business as usual is not impacted.

If you look at the industry trend, the next six or seven years will be SAP S/4HANA migrations and adoptions of SAP cloud applications, whether it is SAP SuccessFactors, Ariba, or Fieldglass. We strongly believe that WorkSoft can play a pivotal role in delivering large-scale SAP S4 HANA programs since Worksoft can support the implementation of SAP cloud applications. We have delivered a couple of major SAP S/4HANA programs by leveraging Worksoft Certify. 

One of the key things that we have done is introduce test automation on day one in system integration testing (SIT). We don't want to wait until the program is over, then start the automation development. We start the automation right from the build phase, then we are able to deliver test automation on day one to the SIT.

If you look at the customer's experience, we have seen that if you take any testing engagement, whether it is large-scale system integration testing activities, UAT, or regression testing, and have seen that companies involve their business workforce to do lot of manual testing. Then, the business needs to take from the business critical activities and focus on testing. Worksoft significantly reduces the testing effort involved, so they can focus on their business critical activities. 

The company has been investing in a lot of new features. They are changing the trend in market demand, especially with their Worksoft Analyze features. These are important for customers when they have massive test case documentations. In addition, Worksoft is changing their direction towards Robotic Process Automation (RPA).

If you take any Robotic Process Automation, the key things you need are:

• The ability to automate SAP.
• The integrated software applications.
• Support for continuous testing or providing a platform to adopt DevOps.

I can see that Worksoft has been investing in these areas to make the product more relevant for SAP-centric platforms.

Another fantastic thing about Worksoft Certify is using it for end-to-end testing of packaged applications. We are able to automate, not just SAP, but the entire application ecosystem. If you take any company, SAP is the backbone, and if they use SAP ERP, then, there are multiple software applications, where some of them are SAP and some of them are non-SAP applications. Worksoft is one of the tools which can transcend across SAP and non-SAP applications. Non-SAP application include Java or .NET. Worksoft can seamlessly automate these applications.

If you take any ALM tool, Worksoft can be easily integrated, whether it is Micro Focus ALM or SAP Solution Manager. Another important thing is Worksoft's integration with SAP Solution Manager BPCA, this is helping customers to set up a risk-based testing platform. They can do impact assessment and identify test scripts to be tested based on the transports to be applied. Then, import that testing suite into Worksoft Certify and trigger the automation. We have seen that bi-directional integration between SAP solution manager and Worksoft Certify. This makes the product seamless, and if you take any company, they have their own ALM tool and the level of usage of Solution manager is varying. WIth the API that Worksoft provides, it can be easily integrated with the leading test management tools available in the market.

I would like Worksoft Certify to do automation at any layer (the UI layer, API layer, or database layer) and challenge competitors in the RPA industry, like UiPath and Automation Anywhere. 

A lot of customers are looking at testing, not just at the UI level, but testing the application or their ecosystem at the API layer. Worksoft could invest on testing on APIs. There are some open source tools available in market which do this, like SoapUI. 

The stability of the automation tool to run without any performance issues has improved with the use three-tier architecture. The three-tier architecture in Worksoft can help the customers access applications across globe. If global customers have geographically diverse teams, we recommend customers go with a three-tier architecture.

We have seen the customers starting their automation journey from zero test scripts to 8000 or 10,000 scripts. We have seen that Worksoft is able to scale up, then run thousands of test scripts concurrently and deliver value.

One of our customers has about 10 SAP applications with about 70 plus non-SAP applications. So, we automate approximately 80 SAP and non-SAP applications using Worksoft Certify.

A lot of our customers have used the technical support. Worksoft has a very good customer success team, as well as technical support team. When we started our first relationship with Worksoft, we had to build the integration between ALM and Worksoft Certify. So, Worksoft was agile enough to build that integration faster. We can see that the technical support team is fast enough to resolve some of the product bugs for any customer queries quickly. The team is open to build any type of new integrations to support the emerging tools available in the market.

As a partner, we help our customers to invest in the right tools and platform. So, we educate our customers to buy Worksoft Certify. We help them to build a business case or plan and do a joint PoC with Worksoft. We enable and empower our customers with enough details and help them to invest in the right automation tool for SAP, which is Worksoft Certify.

Some of our customers do not have any tools in their landscape. In that case, it is easy to position Worksoft Certify. Other customers already have other automation tools in their landscape in which they are experiencing a lot of pain points with their automation tool. They invested a lot of money in their automation tools and framework, but they did not realize the benefits. Therefore, we help those customers move away from their existing tools to Worksoft Certify. If they decide to build on their existing tool and use Worksoft Certify, it's a very complicated decision. We need to build a very strong business case and we also need to help the customers to migrate the automation test suite.

Worksoft installation is straightforward. They have a dedicated team to support the customers during the initial installation. It doesn't take more than couple of days to complete the installation. A lot of our customers are very happy with the way Worksoft completes the initial installations. 

Also, the professional services offered by Worksoft to help the customer to set up the test automation best practices using Worksoft has been helping the customers to roll out enterprise wide automation using Worksoft Certify.

Worksoft Capture 2.0 can help our customers to accelerate their automation development at least 40 percent faster than any other commercial tools available in the market.

We have seen that the initial Worksoft implementation has helped our customers reduce their testing cycle time by 50 percent. With further continuous improvement, we have seen cycle time reduced up to 75 percent. That is the level of productivity achieved using Worksoft Certify.

If I compare Worksoft Certify with other script-based automation tools, the test maintenance is relatively faster. We save about 60 to 70 percent of the maintenance effort by using it because it's model-based and scriptless. This helps the business team and the automation testers to quickly identify the changes needed to be introduced in the automation scripts.

The typical value realization takes about six to 12 months based on the number of scripts and how often the customer wants to execute.

Worksoft can help you to select the right automation platform, then deliver value quickly.

Our customers evaluate three or four major products along with Worksoft: Micro Focus UFT, Tricentis Tosca, Testimony from Basis Technologies, and then some of open source tools. Some of the customers evaluate all the tools, and some of the customers pick one of the other tools along with Worksoft Certify to make their decision.

There are a lot of tools available in the market. However, if you take any automation project, the lead time to implement an automation solution is typically, painfully longer. It may not give the right return on investments. 

We could have gone with any commercial tools available in the market or open source tools, but going with Worksoft gave us a few advantages. We were able to deliver and implement automation two and a half times faster than any other automation tools. Then, if you look at the total cost of effort to build, maintain, and run the scripts in the customer landscape, it is phenomenally low compared to other tools in the market.

Worksoft gives you return on investment faster than its competitors. It will make your QA organization more agile and nimble.

We recommend our customers be very serious about automation and not to experiment with too many tools. Start with a small PoC or pilot. Involve their business team to articulate the value of what Worksoft can deliver, not just within the IT department, but also the business. 

Worksoft Certify has ease of use, ease of maintenance, and value realization. Automation is not just completing testing faster, it's about reducing production support incidents, after go-live or ongoing production support incidents. It's a collective total cost of ownership and all about delivering value to the IT operations team, IT project team, and the business team.

With Capture 2.0, we have seen the product evolve. Worksoft Capture 2.0 is helping our customers to accelerate automation development. Introducing automation around day one is only possible because of Capture 2.0. When we are in the build phase, we can capture the important screens, whether it is in SAP Fiori apps, the SAP GUI, or SAP cloud apps. During the development phase, we can start building the automation scripts, then start leveraging automation on day one in SIT.

Worksoft can support modern UIs quite easily, such as SAP Fiori and Oracle Fusion. If you look at the modern UIs, it is all about the customer experience, and we have seen that Worksoft can evaluate that modern user interface and ensure that the customer experience is delivered as expected.

We use Worksoft Certify for testing and non-testing. 

• Under the testing umbrella, we use it for regression testing, disaster recovery, validations, and system refresh testing. This has been our main focus. 
• Recently, we have started getting more requests for more RPA-light type of work, which is not testing. It is using the same skills, process knowledge, and tool sets to do work that would replace manual repetitive tasks with automation.

We use Worksoft Certify for some basic ServiceNow functionality or Workday releases, weekly and quarterly releases. For SAP Hybris and ECC, we are also using it for our internal security protocol testing. So, we test Office 365 and Windows 10 compatibility. We test some Excel functionality and file sharing, as part of our security protocols. The most in-depth end-to-end testing that we have is in SAP.

We have done a lot of manual testing. We still do a lot of manual testing for our projects. We've eliminated a significant amount of manual testing with our system refresh, automation, and for technical upgrades where changes are known. However, for projects with new enhancements and functionality, we are having a slower time penetrating into them. With regression testing, we have completely replaced it with automation. 

Now, we are trying to shift as much as we can to start automating processes earlier in the project lifecycle, but it has still been a bit of a challenge. This is one of our stretch goals for this next year. The non-testing area is where we have had the most growth over the last six months.

The freshest example is some of the RPA-light activities that we have done. We have been able to save on a lot of manual work for some very highly skilled, expensive resources. This has been able to free up a significant amount of their time so they can spend more time on innovation and more creative, value-add activities. That's been one of the more rewarding things that we've done, and the most appreciated. 

We run our tests and our full suites every week. We have them scheduled in batches so certain sections of our scripts run every day, then we run them through the whole suite every week. That is how we maintain them by running and repairing them.

To run them every week and make repairs takes us maybe two hours. Because they are scheduled on batches to run, it's lights out. They are pretty hardened at this point, so there are not a lot of repairs for data, etc. If there is a break, it is usually because there has been a change to a process that we were not aware of. Our automated scripts are the company's best business process documentation, as we don't have a business process management tool. Therefore, if anybody wants to know about our business processes, they come to us for something like training or new production support resources. They will come and watch our automation if they want to understand how the systems work.

The ability to run multiple processes at the same time remotely or on a schedule. So, we have some testing that we do every day, and it is pretty much lights out. It is unmanned. We have some virtual machines that run on a schedule. Therefore, it's out of mind testing unless there is an issue. They are very hardened tests. If there is an issue, it means that there is something that we needed to catch, so it is always a good catch. This has given us a lot of flexibility because now we can use those resources in other ways. Besides the basic automation capability, it has been great having the ability to test multiple applications and multiple processes at the same time and overnight, then just receive the results.

I have always appreciated the Capture tool. I'm excited about the new enhancements that have been made to it. I think this will make adoption a lot easier because the tool is a lot easier to use and has more capability. I'm excited, because this is a good time for us as we are expanding into more RPA-light space. It will be easier if we could have some of our more technical resources doing a lot of this capture work. Then if they do something wrong, it's very intuitive to stop, delete that step, and start over. It will make adoption a lot better, and we'll get better requirements and processes documented that we can then convert into automation.

The time it takes users to document, then for us to automate, depends. We have a lot of end-to-end business processes, but they have to go across functional teams. They tend to get passed around a bit. Worksoft definitely saves time. We were literally getting processes on napkins. We didn't care how we got them as long as we got them. They would walk us through really fast, and they would try to show us. We were doing screenshots and trying to record them in WebEx. 

Since a lot of the business process owners are onshore and the developers for the automation are offshore. It was very challenging trying to find a time when they could get together. This product allows them to do the capture on their own time. It can be very quick. They just send it over, then they're done. They don't have to think about it anymore, and it's documented well enough that we then don't have to spend a lot of time coming back to them. It just makes the whole process more efficient.

I would like more reporting in analytics. There is a lot of manual work for us as program managers and test managers which has to do with supporting our value statements. E.g., if there is some way that we could systematically capture how long it is taking for automation processes to execute, then we could insert some notes as far as here is how long it took for them to do the manual capture. Then, we could calculate time saved and have a formula for savings. 

If they have some templates that we could all partner, there are a lot of customers who have created their own, but with the new companies coming onboard. Do they create them on their own or do they try to leverage the best practice within our customer community? There is more we can do here.

There are no issues so far. We haven't had any problems with the tool not being available for us when we need it. 

We had trouble with an upgrade once, but there was an immediate response on their side. We had a very technical resource who helped us get past it quickly. So, there has never been anything which has really stopped us from working.

Because we started early with the tool, it took us a while. I feel like we almost glued things together as our needs became more. The capability that was delivered by Worksoft was there. Therefore, there hasn't been a time when they have been behind me when I have needed something that wasn't available.

I am expecting it will the same in the RPA space. We will grow together because of our close partnership, and if there is a gap, I can work with them to figure out what the best approach is to close it. I think we will be able to stay with the tool for a long time because of its scalability.

I am aware that they have some challenges with some of their support resources, especially offshore which is very common. I don't think this is specifically a Worksoft issue. It always seems to be a software issue, and I know that Worksoft is aware of this and they are trying to make some improvements. 

If ever I need to escalate something, I never feel like I'm stopped. I always feel like there is another level where I can go and get support. We have never had an issue which has gone unresolved for a long time. We try to follow the process, but since our team is so experienced with the tool, if we can't fix it and their support can't fix it either. then it gets escalated up through the chain, getting somebody whose pretty senior with the tools to help us.

Our initial goal was regression testing. It was really expensive. It was throwaway work. We always had to outsource it. It overlapped other test cycles within a project. So, all the functional business folks were busy. It was something that if we left it up to the project resources, they didn't do a very good job with it. We would bring in manual testers almost literally off the street. They didn't know our processes. They ended up having to interact with our project resources anyway. It was just a mess. It was inefficient, clunky, expensive, and the quality was poor. 

We knew that we had a lot of SAP implementations coming up because we had acquired several new companies. So, we made the decision at that time that we needed to automate regression testing. That was our first initial goal, and we've hit that. During our last major SAP implementation project. Our regression coverage was at 90 percent which is pretty much the top you can ever really expect. Now, we are looking at other use cases.

The initial setup was a little rough in the beginning. It was so new for us. The whole idea of automation was new that trying to get the tool setup, internalizing all the best practice training and everything that came so quickly, was a lot to try to digest. Thus, we ended up asking if we could spread the mentoring out across a few months. This seemed to work better for us.

We purchased the software, then we found a vendor on our own to help us with the development.

It has saved us significant time. I have an entire dashboard that I use to showcase to everybody the amount of manual hours that we have saved and how that equates to dollars saving.

On our last big SAP implementation project, we inserted an automation resource into the beginning of the project. Between automating regression processes, data staging, and using our automation to help repair cutover and conversion issues, we saved the project about $1,700,000.

Worksoft has paid for itself fives times over.

We evaluated Micro Focus UFT, Selenium, SAP CBTA, and Worksoft.

My main focus was an SAP automation solution, and Worksoft was really good in that space. They were an SAP partner, but I recognized that I wanted something to be more scalable across other applications, and that ruled out the SAP solution. We liked the price point of Selenium and some of the open source tools, but there are risks to something like that. You don't have as much control, and there are always security concerns. Our internal teams weren't excited about that, as they are not great with SAP. We already had a lot of pain points with UFT. It took way too long to develop processes with UFT. It required more coding.

I would recommend taking a slower, organic approach to automation. It is hard to insert ourselves into the projects. The functional resources, business resources, and process owners don't have a lot of time for us. They don't see the value initially. It is overhead for them and more work. So, you have to bite off small chunks. Show the value, then build up the trust. If you try to be too aggressive and force something down everybody's throats, they will barf.

If you have super strong executive support and it's a top-down, e.g., the CIO says, "You will do this or else." You may be successful. However, in that scenario, your failures will be noticed and made very public. If you take a slow organic approach, where you're just trying to be really helpful and free up time, doing little favors here and there, you build up confidence. Then, people support you more for your success.

Start with the low hanging fruit for the value. Build it up. Once you get a bit more expertise, then start tackling the more complex processes.

Worksoft is a great supplier to work with. They have never pushed back when we have had issues or questions. They have always been available to help us. They put us in touch with other customers that have done something similar to what we were looking to do. They set up user groups by region so we could get together. They facilitate a lot of good discussions. That's why I mentioned we continue to grow together: customers and suppliers. It's just been a great relationship. We don't get that with every vendor. So, when we have it we appreciate it.

It has been very easy to use, but I don't think every automation tool is for everyone. I don't think just anybody off the street can come in and use it. Maybe for some basic stuff, but if you really want to maximize the use of the tool, you need some folks who are really experts in it. 

We were able to really grow when we hit that inflection point: When we transitioned to a different vendor that we had doing our automation development. They were experts in the tool. That was when we started being able to deliver these creative solutions. That was when we were able to see the cost per automated script go down, because they were able to develop so much faster.

While it can be used by everyone on the surface level or to capture the business processes, to get more return on your investment, you have experienced resources using it.

Our primary use case is test automation. We have an SRP solution called One1ERP on an ERP platform. We started the automation in Worksoft Certify, getting more than a thousand test cases automated.

Nowadays, we also have automation for a web application in our HR area, so all our HR processes on the platform, Pega. This started to be automated since November last year. We have 40 test cases automated on this application in one year. 

Improvement means for us that we have to be better in quality. Due to automation, you can run every automated test case twice a week. If you do it manually, you do it once per release. This is a quality improvement.

We always have to be more efficient. E.g., if we can directly automate test cases, so if we are using older test cases, then by just switch the company code (national company), we don't have to do it manually. We are able to directly automate the test. This saves money, which is always important for our top management.

We are creating a team an automation team, which will have up to 10 people/colleagues. This will be set up in Bratislava, and those 10 colleagues will work 100 percent on automation. Usually our SMEs do the test execution and try as hard as possible to have everything directly automated, e.g., 40 percent test execution and 60 percent automation. In the end, we want to have a pure automation team who is just doing automation, and have the testers on another team. After the tests are finalized, then they can give them directly to the automation team, or work on them together. That is a mixture. For those colleagues, it's really 100 percent automation

We are interesting to do better, year-by-year. At the moment, we are doing automated regression tests. The next step would be DevOps or artificial intelligence. Our programs should also develop in this way. We want to have automation everywhere where it is possible. Therefore, we need more options for these next steps.

We have used Capture, and it works with Worksoft Analyze. We had some experience last year in August because we started our schedule 1.0 and used Analyze in our tests. We were using the central site for one year with our ERP testing and were quite successful, but this was with Capture 1.0. Then, there was a change to Capture 2.0. In the end, there have been some challenges with the newer version. Therefore, the company testers, the local ones, do not want to use Capture 2.0.

40 percent of the test cases were finalized with automated capture and automated documentation, then the others were done manually. Because we have to create test nodes, we were asked to create a tool that automates documentation, which was Worksoft Analyze. However, with the switch to Capture 2.0, we had some challenges in the beginning. What we did afterwards, together with Worksoft, was we sorted through all the known bugs. So, at the moment, we don't have any known bugs open. We will retry this year in our central test first to find out if it Work Analyze is fine, then if it is okay, we will continue with the local test teams, as well.

On the Capture 2.0 topic, we were not satisfied, because we had a version that wasn't really tested from my perspective. Of course, Worksoft said it was tested, but we found a lot of bugs. In the end, our national company and local test teams did not use Worksoft Analyze because it stopped working. We have ten steps, then on the ninth step, it stopped working and we would have to do it again. So, they stopped using Worksoft Analyze and Capture 2.0. However, this is solved. Worksoft directly helped us to find out what the bugs are, and solved them. Then, we retested it. At the moment, we don't have any open bugs.

On average, it takes one day for Capture 2.0 users to create document. We expect it is faster, but you have to do it several times sometimes. You have to check the documentation that everything is fine. 

There have not been many issues at all, maybe one or two during the last three years. However, it has been quite stable.

Worksoft has good scalability. This is also the reason why we easily can automate for our new laptops.

Usually, we have one contact person for support, who then will contact the Worksoft support. Our contact organizes the people around her. While we have some direct contacts, and most of the time, we receive answers from them. I don't know if there is somebody behind them from the second or third level. 

We are forced to have efficiencies every year. We always get less budget and having to do more. So, we had to have some ideas, and our idea in 2017 was to increase automation. We had automation in place beforehand with eCut. However, in the end, we cut rates 10 to 15 percent. With Worksoft Certify, we had this campaign year with company codes up to 80 percent of the automation rate. This is much faster, and we are finding the defects earlier. In the end, you can save money and have better quality.

In three months, we created 1000 scripts with Worksoft. When the three years before with eCut, we did 450 scripts. This is where we saw a difference.

The initial setup was straightforward. 

In the beginning, it took a long time to integrate Worksoft in our landscape because we have a lot of security levels to fulfill. Therefore, it was not permitted to be install on the security server. It had to be installed through our data center. We learned step-by-step.

Due to security issues we could not use VPN tunnels, we had to have a jump server. This cost us in the end up to eight months. We had four solutions beforehand that were not successful. The fifth one was the jump server. This was the final one and is our solution at the moment.

In Germany, we have a higher security level. Therefore, it costs us by having a longer time to integrate. This is due to our requirements, not Worksoft. The reason why it took that long was on our side. We have a lot of IT departments. With security, social partners, and data privacy, there are a lot of requirements to fulfill.

After that, we agreed to have an automation manager on our team from Worksoft. He sat in Bratislava and all the open issues or questions sent to him, and he answered them, either directly or he contacted the support teams. Then, he assured that those Worksoft issues were solved. He also gave us hints how to use Worksoft, such as naming conventions and how to use it so you don't have a mess in the system.

After we had the automation manager for eight months, then he left. We decided to go with Cognizant, but that was also not successful. In the end, we decided to to have a Worksoft expert from Worksoft, if we need it. For example, we now need an for an expert for two weeks, who will tidy up our system. 

In the beginning, we had an integrator, Cognizant, who created a lot of scripts, but we stopped because we had a contract with them that they would install Worksoft, but it was not allowed. In the end, they just did some automated scripts for us. Our automation team in Bratislava was not satisfied with the quality in the end. We want to have a flexible style with quality, and this wasn't done by our Cognizant colleagues. Therefore, we decided to do it on our own.

From Cognizant, they were sold as SAP and Worksoft experts. Concerning Worksoft, I cannot say if they're expert or not. Concerning SAP, not all of them were experts, maybe one. However, this is always the same in this business. We also had cooperation with Worksoft. Concerning the flexibility of the scripts, we decided to work on our own.

We expect partners too be really good. Otherwise, the company does not see why we should pay for them.

Saving money and better quality, these are the benefits of Certify.

We have seen ROI. This was one of the goals from our top management when investing in automation. They want to see savings in the following year.

We did an RFP in 2016 and 2017. We found that Worksoft is easier to use because our business experts can do the tests. We didn't have to have IT experts, like with eCut.

If you use SAP, you can use this. It is easy.

I am really satisfied with the product. If I ask for support, I get support. I have direct contacts and every issue will be discussed. If we need something, they help us directly.

We did not automate our test maintenance. 

We don't have experience using it with apps and mobile testing, but are looking to add this to our portfolio in the future.

We have automated quite a number of test cases in last year.

We have a weekly release. A weekly release means every week that we have testing going on. The particular year where we started is called the asset management area. We could never run our Intuit testing, and we have a whole lot of Intuit testing. This one product helped us pass the testing with the Nighthawk testing, which is working on the Nighthawk manager. That's the one that we use. We can switch it on in the night and run the testing, then come back in the morning and see what has been completed. If there is any fail, we can even analyze it. We can use the evidence document to pass it on to development team to tell them, "This is where we failed."

It has improved on our defect management time. It has improved our test execution time. I don't need to manage these things, just sit somebody down to look at how the script runs. There are a lot of ways that it has helped us.

It is very easy to maintain. With scripts, I can change one line and in one step. Whatever I want, I can do. I don't need to be an expert to use it. Being a manager without a whole lot of technical knowledge, like an automation person, I can change Worksoft using what I learned during the training. That's what I like about it. Anybody can do automation.

I love the Capture 2.0 feature. When you are doing a normal manual testing, go ahead and switch on the Capture 2.0 feature, then capture everything and pass it on to your teams who can convert them quickly into test automation. With this feature, it is saving our automation creation time by about 60 to 70 percent. It is also helping our manual testing time in terms of catching all the evidence documents. 20 to 25 percent time is being saved because of this product and Capture 2.0 feature and what we are receiving with the good documentation.

I would expect more opportunities to automate Java.

I would like it to analyze what we are not using. 

I would like to see the impact analysis integrated with the performance testing tool. We have multiple tools doing multiple items. I would like to have one common tool. 

I'm also interested in load testing automation and whether we can create a script for it, then can we use the same script for my performance testing? 

Stability is quite good when compared to other things. I don't want to say it gets 100 percent rate in terms of stability, because I'm using this for about ten to ten and a half months right now. It has been close to a year, but I'm really amazed when comparing it to any other tool that I have used in the past.

I don't have the words to express its scalability besides awesome. The amount of changes that we have seen are tremendous.

We don't use them frequently, just when we have an issue. I would rate the technical support a seven out of ten. Most of the team is good and helpful. However, I would like them to evaluate the issues a little more sometimes before escalating them to engineering.

We were previously using Micro Focus UFT. The tool was good, and we did not have a lot of problems with it. The only problem was SAP changes a lot of things every time. The frequent changes were causing a lot of issues for us in terms of automation. We were able to automate many things, but the maintenance was a big problem for us. 

1. You needed to have a person who had the coding knowledge to do it.
2. The frequent changes made the scripts useless. Then, we would have to come back and redo a lot of things. 

This is where we were looking for a product where we could have minimum maintenance that anybody can automate. This is the concept why we came into Worksoft.

We used Worksoft team initially. That helped us through the setup and other things. They did a great job. We probably automated about 275 tests in less than five weeks, including the setup. 

I suggest people go head and use Worksoft, along with their services, when you buy the tool. They will help you to onboard it quickly and set it up for you. They will do lot of the automations. They will help you with lot of these practices, then you can take it over from there.

We have seen ROI.

By using automation, it reduced about 75 percent of the time when compared to any other tool. The changes for Worksoft used the same script as the script automating UFT. Manually, running our tool takes about 4 hours, but with Worksoft, we were able to do it in less than 30 minutes. Whereas, the same thing that you had to do would take you almost 55 minutes to an hour. There is now a 50 percent savings in terms of other automation tools and an 85 percent savings in terms of manual to automation.

We have seen more than 40 to 50 percent reduction, in terms of all around time, where we were doing five days a week for a major maintenance testing of our first cycle. We have reduced it down to three days now. So, that is a 40 percent savings which we are seeing. We are not completely automated because we are still doing sampling. We have just automated a good 40 percent of our things. When we go to 80 to 100 percent, it will reduce 60 to 80 percent of our time, which is what we are looking for.

We looked at Panaya, but Panaya is not a desk automation tool. We are using Panaya for some of our impact analysis.

We did try with Selenium and many other vendors. A lot of other tools have a small test director that we tried. The ease in using this tool is very good because our business team can go in and use it. So, anybody can record for me and capture. Then, we have a very small team of automation testers who can convert the information immediately into a reusable component, parameterize it, and do the records sets. In that way, with a very small set of test automated guys, we can do much more.

I recommend this solution already to my colleagues worldwide.

We run this on seven different multiple applications. It starts from SAP, goes to the UI, comes back to SAP for violations, and then goes to mainframe for validation. Then, we use Java Web as a Java. After that, there is another HDM which we try to validate. Also, we are trying to validate a third-party application using it, because we have used a lot of their components trying to do a mock type of filing import/export option with the tool. 

We have used this solution for web UI testing, as we are on SAP Web UI 5.0 right now. We use this very heavily right now in our asset management area. It is very easy to use. The Capture 2.0 together with it is helping us, because we are now able to recognize some objects through Capture 2.0. We also have LiveTouch. This is another advantage where you can use this to capture multiple items at a time.

We use Worksoft Certify to test our SAP System. We have a global instance of SAP, which we started implementing in 2012, and we are still in the process of implementing. We have rolled out SAP to about 80 percent of our manufacturing and distribution. Right now, the remaining projects are a small distribution center and sales offices. We have ongoing projects, and three times a year, we release a new version of SAP. We rolled out SAP to a new geography, and we also added new features for our business users. Thus, as part of those projects, we use Certify to do regression testing of our existing business processes, and we also use it in the project to test new functionality.

When we are rolling out in a new country, we do a configuration for that new country. We use the automation test to test the business processes and prices of that new country. It is sort of semi-automated. Our business analysts generate sales orders from the new country, and we will run them through the shipping orders to cash, the shipping steps, and the concrete steps. Then, we get a set of documents to review. The business analysts review those documents to make sure the order is processed correctly. So, it's not fully automated, but it does help cut down on testing a lot when we roll out to new countries. 

For regression testing, that is fully automated. We have tests where the software checks the results and either returns a pass or fail. These are run as a regression suite anytime we push a change to production.

We do use it for the end-to-end testing of packaged applications, primarily SAP. We do have some plugin applications that we use it to test, which are part of the business process. We use Salesforce for CRM, and we have a custom built eBusiness application. While we don't do extensive testing of those applications using Certify, when the business processes touch one of those applications, we do cover those application with another certified test.

It has cut down on the amount of low level, grunt work that business analysts have to do and can free them up to do more critical thinking. Before we had test automation, we were running tests and relied on people, which was very time consuming. A business process test might have 100 to 150 steps across different applications, and we don't have a single person who has expertise in all those applications. When executing a manual test, we have to balance the test between different people to do their steps. In a typical project, we might have 100 to 150 of these types of tests running. The coordination of the testing process where you have to have different people available at different times is very time consuming and inefficient. What automation has done is cut that cycle dramatically because automation does not have to worry about having to find the right order management or warehouse person to do their steps. The automation just runs through, then the business analyst can review the results afterwards. Therefore, it has been more efficient, cutting our testing part down by almost two-thirds to 75 percent.

Our automation tests are more robust than our manual tests. We found our test lab would grow over time because we didn't have a lot of discipline within the team for manual testing to have a master test which could be used repeatedly and revise as necessary. So, they were creating a new test for every specific little thing that they wanted to test. They were  setting up these manual tests where they had ten to 15 tests which tested the same thing, but not quite. Therefore, it became a bear to manage. Whereas, with automation, because it is more controlled, we have a core set of about 125 automation tests entered into our library. That's in our change control. Therefore, we know exactly what the state of our tests are. 

If there is a new business process or new wrinkle in a business process, we didn't have a defined process, so now we are updating automation tests. The quality of the data that we're getting out of test from automation is much higher than we received out of manual testing. If we know the automation suite is parsing, then the application is working properly. With automation, we have more confidence that if the test is parsing than the application under test is working correctly.

It is fairly straightforward. We have some deep expertise after using it for five years. We have some people who know it now very well. 

This type of marginalization of the code inside Worksoft Certify has been very valuable to us. The ability to capture documentation. We are a technology company and are regulated, so we have pretty stringent requirements. We use Certify to capture screenshots and evidence during testing. We can capture every screenshot during the business process including a document and hand it off to the auditors. It makes defending an audit very simple. We can, if they ask for evidence, produce a document that shows the business process of every step and the screenshots showing all the pertinent data, which has been pretty useful as well. This is the report feature with Certify. When you run a test, you can either have it generate documentation or run it in the background. Most of the time when we were running regression tests, we just run them in the background. 

We don't generate documentation, but we could turn Capture 2.0 on, where it creates a screenshot. As we're starting the test, it creates a screenshot of the application it is testing every step of the way and produces a word document or a pdf at the end that you can then hand off to auditors and show them the actual flow of the process that you're testing. However, we do not use this feature.

One feature that we have been asking for has been to treat tests as code and store the source code for tests in a configuration management tool. Right now, for version control of testing, it's all internally within the tool. If we have a test of a business process and want to revive that test, our methodology now is purely manual work. We go into the tool, create a copy of the existing test, and call the next one: v2. Now, we have two of them and the only way you can tell them apart is by its naming convention.

This is not an efficient way in terms of how modern applications do version control. If this was code, we could plug it into a tool like Git or GitHub to manage of our versioning and branching. The reason why we want to do this is that the application which we are testing branches. When we branch the code, we put a bunch of new functionality on the new version while our production version stays unchanged. Then, at the end, we merge the two together.

From an automation testing perspective, we have to run tests on both. Then, we have two current versions of our test. So, it's a bit hard to manage in the tool right now because you can only have this manual approach where we are tracking it via the name convention. Whereas, a modern way of doing it would be to have our application plug it into a version management tool, like GitHub, where we would store the code and could just pull in the version of the test that was applicable to the version of the software that we were testing.

This is something we have been asking for for a while now. I understand that it's in the pipeline, and it may be in their latest version (version 11). This is something that we will be looking into this quarter.

The challenge that we face everyday for test automation are more internal (people issues). We need change management and getting people to accept automation instead of the technical limitations of the tool. The tool does what we need it to do from an SAP testing perspective.

We have no stability issues. 

Maintenance-wise, we have one system administrator who is not full-time, since it has been pretty stable. We don't change much compared to other applications. This application is pretty hands-off.

We should be upgrading to the latest version in next couple of months.

At our peak usage, we have had seven people working on it, and have had no issues with that. Now, with our current work load, we only have three people. We only run our test suite. It was one of my goals on this project that we had the infrastructure setup, so we could always run our entire test suite overnight. As we built out our library, this meant expanding our infrastructure. Right now, we have 100 to 150 integration tests, and some of them can take ten to 20 minutes to run. A single instance of Certify can only run one at a time. Thus, we have had to think about how we set up our infrastructure in such a way that we can run the entire suite of 150 tests in six hours.

The way that we have done this is to split it up amongst servers. Therefore, we still have extra servers for execution. We have four servers now and run the tests in batches of about six queued up at a time. In this way, we can run our suite of 150 in parallel across four machines and get it done in about six hours. Right now, we do this manually. We do the manual breaking up and monitoring. I know Worksoft has some tools which automate this. This is something that is on our radar to look at as we grow. However, right now, we just manually manage the process.

We have three test developers using it. These are the people actually building tests. In terms of consumers of the test automation, we have probably 35 to 40 business analyst.

The technical support is pretty responsive. We haven't had many issues with it. When we were doing an investigation into doing web testing, we ran into some roadblocks. The team at Worksoft was very responsive. At the end of the day, it came back to technical limitations of a tool. I have been pretty impressed with how responsive the team. They were always able to answer our questions to the extent that the tool was able to do what we needed to do.

It was all manual. For convenience, we used Micro Focus ALM for tracking our manual tests. We still use that as our central hub for our test documentation. We weren't using any test automation tools in IT. Within the organization, we have R&D groups that develop software for various systems and medical devices. Those teams are running tests and code. They are in automation test suites, and I was part of one of those teams before joining IT. However, in IT, before we started using Certify, we weren't using any test automation.

Manual testing was costing us a huge amount of money. We did a double rollout of SAP. We split it over three deployments:

• With deployment one, it was just one division in North America. We had over a 120 people doing manual testing for a period of about sixteen weeks. Add up the cost of that. 
• As we moved into deployment two, we were going to have to test new functionality and also regression test what we'd already booked. If you took the amount of testing that we'd done in deployment one, even if we weren't going to redo all of that, we're going to have to do 50 percent of that. It was going to be a huge manual effort and a sunk cost. We'd put all that money into manual testing and wouldn't have an asset. It would be money that we are basically suspending with no reuseability.

It was a pretty easy decision to convince the team to move to automation because it would be an asset that we could reuse again. Over the last five years, we've shown that we've had a positive ROI on it. The initial upfront cost in terms of licenses, plus all the money that we spent developing tests, has proven it's worth. Now, we can do a regression test suite in ten days as opposed to sixteen weeks.

The setup was very straightforward. We did a proof of concept with Worksoft. They came in and had an engineer onsite. We set them up on a server and pointed them at our test SAP system. They built a couple of prototype tests for us. When it came to implementation, we had an existing prototype that we looked back on. I have a systems administrator on my team, and he was able to pick it up pretty quickly. 

The documentation was good. We did the install on our production system, copying over our prototype tests. We used that as our starting point for building out our library. We also sent out a couple of guys for training.

We were up and running with a functional system within a couple of weeks. The challenge, at that point, came down to training our business analysts on how to use the tool. This took longer than getting the system up and running, which was pretty straightforward.

We did the deployment ourselves. It took less than a week. Internally, we had one system administrator do the bulk of the work.

We ran the deployment on Windows Server. We have two machines: a database server and an application server. Our test developers can logon via Windows Remote Desktop to access those machines. They built all their tests out on that system. Architecture-wise, it is hosted all behind our firewall, but it is all server-based. No one is building tests on their local desktops. It's all server-based, and we can share some of our scripts amongst our team members.

My primary team is offshore. They are in India and Bangalore. Therefore, all of the test development is done there. However, we can access the central test library seamlessly, and  the test strategy for setting up and standing up servers and installing the software was pretty straightforward.

Our ROI is primarily a reduction in testing time. The testing, when we were doing it manually, was 30 to 40 percent of the project's cost. This was a $450 million USD deployment of SAP, and testing is 30 to 40 percent of that cost. We spent probably about a million and a half in test automation, but managed to reduce our testing times from weeks to days. There is a clear cut return.

If we write a new test that's 80 percent the same as an existing test, it is pretty straightforward to reuse the steps from existing tests for our new tests and build upon them. We found that there has been increasing ROI automation as we built up our library. When we write new tests now very seldom is a new test build from scratch. It is normally a variation of something that we already have, so we can turn those around pretty quickly within a couple of days to two weeks.

We ended up buying too many licenses. They were very good at selling it to us, and probably oversold it a little. We bought 45 licenses and have never used more than twenty. However, they gave us a pretty significant discount on the bigger license, so it made sense for us to buy enough that we wouldn't have to go back and ask for more. 

At that time, we had budget to do that. The licensing is pretty straightforward. We have considered using them to do robotic process automation and may still do that. Initially, we were worried that our license might preclude us from using the tool for something other than testing, but when we checked into that, there is no limitation. 

We could use Certify to do robotic process automation, which is basically running a process on your correction system instead of your test system. Therefore, we may do that in the future. 

We also looked at HPE UFT (the HPE automated testing tools) and SAP TAO (SAP's own internal test automation). The reason we pretty quickly went with Worksoft was primarily the responsiveness of the team. The evaluation happened between deployment one and deployment two.

When implementing SAP, we had IBM as our system integrator. We went to both SAP and HPE asked them to show us what they could do for test automation. We also looked around and found Certify as a third candidate. The response from the Worksoft team was far higher than the other two. IBM wasn't able to produce sufficient expertise to demonstrate the SAP test automation tool and same with HPE. I also didn't have a good response from them. We felt, " If this is the level of support that we were getting during the sales cycle, how will it be after the sale has occurred and we have to go to them for support?" Whereas, Worksoft was very responsive. They sent people onsite. They did a proof of concept using our system and data. There was a pretty clear cut night and day difference in teams and companies involved. I didn't get a chance to evaluate the technology of the SAP or HPE solution because their sales teams weren't responsive.

We have a dedicated team of what we call test developers who are specialists in this application. While I don't use the application myself, but they're pretty productive with it. We have a team using Certify for SAP Test Automation and a team using Selenium for web application development. The SAP test development is more efficient than the web test development. For a similar sized test development project where they have to test and develop five automated tests of a certain method, we can turn them around in SAP faster than we can turn them around in Selenium.

Now, it might be Selenium has a higher learning curve than Certify. Or, it is easier for test developers to get good at developing test units using Certify. Selenium is far more technical. Of the two tools that we use, Worksoft is more user-friendly than Selenium.

The technical instrumentation was pretty straightforward. The tool does what we need it to do. The primary challenges that we have had with test automation have been change management, getting the old, greater IT organization to accept automation as a substitute for manual testing. Culturally, within our organization, we put a lot of pressure on our business analysts to thoroughly test the application, and if they have never used automation before, there is a fear factor there saying, "I'm responsible. Then, I want to see it with my own two eyes." 

I recommend expanding, training, and coaching people that automation is just as good, if not better, than manual testing in terms of finding bugs and proving that the system is working correctly. It is far faster, and you will get a lot of your life back. That has been the biggest challenge for us: Telling that story and expanding the use of automation throughout our organization. Now, automation is pretty mainstream and accepted, but that was the biggest challenge for us. It certainly wasn't technical challenges.

We don't use Capture 2.0. We found it easier because we have a large pool of business analysts who are not certified users. Our process for capturing the business process which needs to be automated, therefore we use Zoom Recorders. It is like a WebEx tool. It has a screen sharing device and a record feature with audio. We find the audio is quite beneficial. When we capture the business process, we will have people record in Zoom, annotating with their voice (doing a voice over of what they're doing). Then, we handed it off to the test engineers to build up the automation. We look at Capture some time ago and felt it wasn't as efficient. Capture 2.0 is the newest version, and we haven't really looked at it in-depth. We will certainly reconsider it, but right now, we are not using Capture 2.0 to do business processing.

We use web UI testing to a smaller extent as part of the SAP business process. For a business process which incorporate Salesforce, a field service engineer might order a spare part. This is a post process that spans both Salesforce and SAP. For the first half of the processes, we use Certify. We did attempt to use an in-depth testing of web applications sometime ago. At that point, we felt there were some technical limitations. The project was to use Certify to do comprehensive testing of our Salesforce application. However, we found when we did a deep dive that there were some aspects of Salesforce and proprietary screens which Certify already struggle with. At that point, we decided to switch to Selenium which is the industry standard for web testing. Now, we do most of our tests on Salesforce in Selenium. While Certify has become a lot more capable with web testing since then and the newer versions are better at it, at the time we investigated it, we felt that Certify probably wasn't up to scratch as a web testing application.

Going forward, we will look at Certify again as a web testing application tool since it is more efficient than Selenium. We are finding that it's costing us more to develop a test for a web application than it does to develop a test for a SAP based application. We want to take a look at them again as a solution because it might help increase our efficiency as most our applications from this point forward will probably be web applications. So, there's a lot of work to do in that arena.

With our eBusiness and Salesforce suite, we are not even close to full test automation coverage. We still have a lot of work to do. So, it's worth us looking at Certify again. We're expanding into big data and big data analytics. There are a whole slew of terms around that with regard to testing. E.g., how do you verify that your data's accurate? We are just dipping our toes into it, as we haven't done any model testing yet. That is something that we have to look into. There are a lot of areas where we could use it.

In the last couple of years, we have become an established and accepted part of the SAP testing in the organization. We are a fairly conservative group. Now that we've done the SAP testing, we need to start looking at different horizons of mobile, big data, and web testing where we still have a lot of work to do in terms of building up our automation.

Worksoft Certify is being used to run automated weekly regression tests across some of our primary SAP systems in line with our Change and Release management strategy. These tests run every weekend without fail. The results are reviewed on every Monday morning to check for failures and to analyse if any failures are associated with the changes scheduled to be transported to the production environment that week. Failures (if any) are fixed and the tests re-run before transporting the associated changes into the Production environment.

We also utilize it for projects that need extensive business-user testing and functional testing. There can be testing requirements which come at short notice which can take three to four weeks of manual testing effort. By using Certify, we have been able to bring timescales down to a few hours of automated testing effort.

Our final goal is to utilise this for 'Unify', our new global solution which is currently being deployed, which will deliver common processes and systems to all sites and sectors, replacing all our existing legacy systems which will demand extensive regression testing. 

We have never had any systematic regression testing regime in the organisation. This has helped in building an automation framework across our SAP application landscape, thereby introducing mandatory regression testing across all our key systems and improving the overall quality across our production systems.

From an audit perspective, results generated from Certify (BPP reports) provides detailed test evidence which is also being utilized for internal training purposes/training guides, etc. The BPP reports also provide details on failures along with screenshots.

We have a variety of complex systems in our landscape, one of them being the Openlink Endur which is a commodity trading and risk management system. We are currently building an automated regression test suite to support application testing for Endur.

Our weekend regression tests are performed in 'lights-out; mode. Tests are scheduled to run at a certain time over the weekend using the Execution manager functionality. Usage of Certify has also prevented some major defects going into Production and we have seen significant savings in all manual testing activities as the business users/functional teams are getting more time to perform 'value- adding' activities.

Post our recent upgrade to Solution Manager 7.2, we are currently in the process of implementing the Test suite functionality and the integration of the same with Certify. We expect Solution manager to be the single source of truth bringing out all the results from Certify which is going to be extremely beneficial from an audit perspective. We have already implemented the integration of Certify with HP ALM in our landscape.

Moreover, we have this reusable asset now which can be run frequently to support all our projects and change requests across our legacy SAP systems. Even last-minute testing requests are being accommodated by utilising the automated regression suite without any dependency on business users/functional users for their efforts. We use it across the multiple projects which need immediate assistance and for our weekly regression cycles. To give an example of a recent project which was a major platform migration from a Data Centre in Asia to Europe which needed extensive Disaster recovery testing and Functional testing/User acceptance testing. The initial testing estimate was approximately five to six weeks, however with the use of Certify we could do extensive testing in less than three hours saving many weeks of manual testing effort.

It is very user-friendly with an appealing UI, unlike a lot of other automation tools that we have evaluated. With sufficient training and adoption of best practices, the tool will certainly help organisations to successfully implement an automated testing framework and eliminate manual testing activities.

The fact that it can be used across SAP and non-SAP applications (including web-based apps like Web Dynpro) is a big advantage for us because we have a variety of SAP and non-SAP applications across the Johnson Matthey IT landscape. Being a 200-year-old organisation, our variety of legacy systems have a lot to benefit from the use of automated testing.

Certify has many interesting features, e.g.: 'PRIMO' which is the image recognition functionality is a life saver in instances where Certify standard functionality cannot identify and learn objects within certain legacy applications.

Regarding end-to-end testing of packaged applications, Certify is primarily used across our SAP application landscape and the Openlink Endur (commodity trading and risk management system). We hope to realise more benefits by implementing Certify across our wider application landscape over the next few months.

We have been using the Capture feature, although not the latest version, the initial version, for process captures was used to create our test designs. It has been a life saver in many instances, without the need to spend any extra effort to create test designs and captures. The test steps get captured in the background which generates an XML file which can be easily imported into Certify, creating the basic test structure which can be improvised/modified to make it a repeatable reusable test. In terms of the amount of time it takes users to create documentation automation using this feature, it is the same amount one would spend to do a manual test. While a person is performing a manual test, Captures are automatically generated in the background. We have used it extensively to build our test designs.

We have requested for some minor new features which Worksoft is considering.

The PRIMO image recognition functionality has room for improvement, especially around its ability to work with java interfaces, Execution manager scheduling, etc. as we have observed. As we explore more of our legacy systems, I am certain there will be a need to use more of the PRIMO features to learn the objects.

Overall from a SAP perspective, it works almost seamlessly.

One to three years.

The version of Certify that we are using has been mostly stable and we have rarely encountered any problems. Our weekend regression test failures are often associated with environmental/system performance issues and not related to the stability of Certify. I have been happy with the overall performance of Certify and how it has helped to optimise our tests.

I am confident that Certify can scale to fit our automation testing needs as we expand the current automation testing framework across the wider Johnson Matthey application landscape. We are also exploring options to identify potential areas where Certify can help support mass data uploads, etc. to benefit other teams in their day to day operations.

We have several concurrent users accessing Certify in our environment, primarily automation engineers, test engineers and tech managers.

Our interactions with technical support has not been the best always and there is room for improvement especially with respect to the time taken to respond to cases. However, with the right contacts and reasonable escalations we have always managed to get quick attention on our issues.

We have always been heavily reliant on manual testing and as a result, regression testing was not systematic and we could never think of implementing frequent weekly regression test cycles which was challenging. We decided to go ahead with automated testing and use Certify because:

1. Manual regression testing takes a lot of time and resourcing is always a challenge.
2. Regression testing not being systematic, the quality was very difficult to measure as we did not have a standard set of manual regression test scripts/sufficient documentation.
3. There was a delay in our time-to-market because all the testing was being done manually and there was no way we could accommodate frequent, weekly, regression test cycles. That meant high business risk, that we would have more defects in the production environment/ more associated costs.

We had all these challenges and we started exploring options to mitigate these risks and automation was identified as the way forward, nearly two years ago. We evaluated various automation tools in the market. It was critical that we had to identify a strategic tool which would cater to our SAP and non-SAP application landscape. Worksoft Certify came in as a big winner ticking most of our requirements.

We went through a lot of initial challenges, mostly around internal resourcing issues. Looking back, I am happy to say that we could overcome these challenges and have managed to successfully implement an automation framework using Certify.

Early in 2017, we decided to go ahead with Worksoft Certify post evaluation of multiple automation tools. Our initial engagements with Worksoft consisted of several onsite workshops to explore the tool in detail along with technical feasibility assessments across our application landscape. These engagements were extremely beneficial and it gave us the overall confidence to adopt Worksoft Certify as our strategic test automation tool.  

We did a pilot implementation with Worksoft to see if we could take this ahead on a large scale before embarking on the major project to build the automated tests. Some key processes across our critical SAP systems were identified as candidates for this exercise. Test designs were created with support from the functional teams and taken ahead for automation build with Senior Worksoft consultants and our internal resources. This 7-week Automation Roadmap Engagement exercise was extremely successful and we learned a lot of lessons from it which helped us plan the next big phase of the automation roll out. It gave us overall confidence across the functional and management teams which subsequently led to securing the appropriate budget, etc.

One of the biggest lessons learned from this engagement was around the ways to structure our teams. This led to us going ahead with a Managed Services model with Worksoft. We have an offshore based Worksoft Automation Services Factory team who helps build our automated tests. The team can scale up/down based on our automation forecasts.

The automation deployment is still ongoing. The initial phase was completed across a five-month span. Currently we are rolling out the second phase of the automation build focusing primarily on our global Unify solution and the Openlink Endur application.

Regarding implementation strategy, we followed an agile two-week sprint approach. Our functional teams continuously created test designs and these were fed to the Automation Factory every two weeks, who in turn developed the automated tests. This was the most practical model, which worked well in our environment.

At its maximum capacity, we have had approx. 10 to 12 automation engineers in the Factory team. Our functional teams are spread across multiple global locations and we had between 3 to 6 resources working on test designs liaising with the business users as required.

From a script maintenance perspective, we spend an average of 4 to 5 hours every week with the current asset of nearly 800+ tests.

We have always worked directly with Worksoft, along with support from our internal resources. Worksoft has been delivering excellent services through their managed services model.

We have a res-usable re-runnable asset built which is saving a lot of time across the functional teams/business user community.

Our final goal is to utilise this for 'Unify', our new global solution which is currently being deployed, which will deliver common processes and systems to all sites and sectors, replacing all our existing legacy systems, which will demand extensive regression testing. 

It is expensive compared to some of the other automation tools in the market. However, the benefits and ROI has proved that it has been a good investment.

We have concurrent licenses.

SAP TAO and Micro Focus UFT.

It was critical to identify a strategic tool which would cater to the testing requirements across our SAP and non-SAP application (including web based apps like Web Dynpro) landscape. Worksoft Certify came in as a big winner ticking most of our requirements.

It is a great product and we have not seen anything which cannot be automated till date in our application landscape.

It is important to do sufficient technical feasibility assessments before deciding to go ahead with Certify and equally important to determine the best implementation approach which will work for your organisation. Functional teams/business users' buy in is critical as the test designs cannot be created without their continued support. Adoption of best practices around naming conventions/folder structures etc. will help in easy overall maintenance of the test assets, which will also help with the generation of development and execution dashboards/overall reporting.

I would rate Certify at eight out of ten. Worksoft has always been very supportive and responsive to our needs and this has certainly helped us achieve our initial milestones successfully. I am extremely proud of what has been achieved so far and looking forward to expanding the automation framework across our wider IT application landscape over the months ahead.

We have developed some end-to-end regression testing scenarios that we've found pretty valuable, so we have created a bunch of processes in Certify, linked them together, and we use them every week - sometimes more than once a week - in regression testing.

We used another tool for many years. It became unworkable because of the length of our scripts and how many of them there were, and how they were linked together. They became cumbersome in the other tool. It's much easier in Certify, and Certify can handle them, no problem.

In addition, our organization is implementing Agile, we're moving towards continuous development, and I don't see how we could do that, in any imaginable way, without Certify. We're able to import our changes weekly, based on the results in Certify. And we're confident that because of having tested the main business processes, fairly rapidly, within one day, we can tell whether the imports are going to break anything.

It has absolutely enabled us to automate and save time. The weekly imports of the changes allow the developers to plan on a weekly cycle, which increases the speed of their development. They don't have to wait for a release or anything else, they can test their changes quickly and get the results the next day. They know that they're able to import with no problem.

Finally, it has helped us cut test maintenance time. 

The idea that it's not language-specific is really nice. Keywords and the drag-and-drop functionality are great. The ease of use is superior to anything on the market. It's very easy to integrate. We've been very impressed with the tool. Because we primarily use the configuration with SAP, the integration is pretty seamless. But we have used our own in-house VB app as well, and it's worked very well with that. We've really not seen any problems whatsoever with integrating.

We love the Capture 2.0 feature. It seems to work very well. As for how long it takes to create documentation using it, we do not get into the documentation so much. That end is not as useful to us. But it's built-in if we ever needed it. We're not USDA or anything like that so we don't have a super need for documentation right now.

Also, the ability to work with the data, with recordsets, and plug those into the scripts is very easy and very powerful. We use it extensively.

In the past, when we've tried to automate some of our web apps, it has not been as robust. If there were one thing that could be improved, it's interaction with web applications. The issue we were running into is that it was harder to identify the objects than it is with some of the other architectured applications. That's the nature of the beast with the web as well.

It's very stable.

We have had some issues. We would be unable to log in, in certain situations. But they've all been self-inflicted, changes that we've made on our side that have prevented us from being able to use the tool at times. Once we got those resolved, we were fine.

It's fairly easy to scale, which is a nice thing. Once you create what I will call a sub-process, if you want to use that sub-process in many other processes, it's really easy to use. For us, that's what makes it scalable. You can use that same process wherever you need it. The use of the recordsets just allows us to be able to change the data that make it unique and that make it easily maintained. It's very easy to scale. It simplifies our workflow.

Worksoft technical support is very helpful, very knowledgeable. Whenever we've had an issue, they've responded very quickly. We don't actually have very many tickets, but whenever we've had them in the past, I've just gone into the portal and I get an email back, usually the very next day. I've never had to escalate an issue.

We were using Micro Focus UFT. It became completely unworkable for us. Our end-to-end processes were just too cumbersome for the tool to handle. It got worse and worse to the point where we had to say, "You know what? We have to change tools, this is not helping us." That's when we investigated Worksoft, and we were very pleased with how it worked.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

The last time we did it, for the upgrade into version 10, it just required me and one other person on the database side, and then the technical person from Worksoft. It was fairly easy. It took just a couple of hours. At that time, we were just upgrading. The basic architecture was already there so it didn't really require a project plan or anything like that. Once we got it set up, it was just a matter of migrating what we already had in UFT.

There have been several times where it has highlighted an important issue. Some of the defects we've found have been high-impact defects that would've really been costly had they made it to production. There are other times where, because we were able to test with Certify, we knew within a day whether there were gaps in the way we configured a change, things that we had missed that we wouldn't have been able to find if we didn't have the ability to test quickly.

That one defect we found easily saved us $1,000,000. That was just one. Over the years, the amount of money that it has saved us is certainly in that range.

The ability to test quickly has enabled us to develop quickly. We've been able to capture lots of savings in terms of projects that have been delivered faster because we can test faster.

There are savings on a lot of fronts because of this solution.

We would purchase more licenses right now if they were cheaper. Pricing is a little bit of a hindrance.

We didn't look into any alternatives.

It's a highly powerful tool. It's very customizable. It's not a cure-all for everything, but if you want to do end-to-end testing, regression testing, it's a great investment.

We use Certify for end-to-end testing of packaged applications. We have implemented almost anything that touches SAP, using Certify. When C4C came out, the customer application, we regression tested our existing suite to make sure that nothing would break. We anticipate doing the same thing with Success Factor. At the moment, we don't use Certify for web-UI testing, but we're planning on implementing some of that, coming up.

Since it has been up and running, we've had three people maintain it: Myself, I'm the principal QA person, and we have two offshore partners whom I've trained on Certify and they are now helping us execute and maintain the tests. It requires full-time maintenance. We have plans to expand the reach of our automated testing, so we plan on adding more people. We are the only three using Certify in our organization at the moment.

It tests our core business processes but we still have many core business processes that we would like to add to that, to validate if they work, before we send changes through every week. And we would also like to increase the speed at which we can add changes; not just once a week, but eventually daily. We plan on increasing our resources from a manpower standpoint and also from a technological standpoint. We're just going to try to do that as fast as we can. There are a lot of business processes that we would like to add, a lot of apps that we would like to add. The business side has continual, increased demand in terms of things that they are working on and they would like to automate and not test manually, so there's a lot of demand on us right now.

I would rate Certify at nine out of ten. I rely on it every day. It's a great tool, and any problems that we have are hardly ever attributable to the tool itself. It's always some other factor; the way we're using it, or some external factor, which is the problem. It's nice not to have to worry about the tool being the issue. We're very enthusiastic users.