Worksoft Certify Reviews

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.

The primary use case is more on SAP for automating all our manual business work, as well as doing regression testing. We do end-to-end regression testing on SAP.

The product has worked very well with SAP.

Worksoft is used for manual processes that needed to be automated. This has helped us make our processes be faster and more efficient because there are no manual interruptions or errors.

For my processes, Worksoft makes them faster when creating scripts.

Capture 2.0 is a very good feature, on which we can record very easily and get documentation generation and testing acceleration. 

The product had some UI issues. In the next release I heard the UI issues will be lifted up (version 11), I am excited about it because the product will have more UI features. We are thinking of upgrading our existing Worksoft Certify from 9 to 11, when it is released, as this will be good for the company and help all our users.

The stability is pretty good what I have used sofar with SAP

The scalability is good.

The technical support is pretty good. If you open a ticket, they are able to answer it within 24 hours. They are able to support us.

We previously did manually testing and used other tools. With Worksoft, we can more see the productivity and benefits that it provides. We can also do more testing, making easier for all the users. 

We used the Worksoft for the deployment. They came and helped us. We have a good relationship with them.

Worksoft Certify is an investment. We see value in it more than the money. We see value in it because the user can look at different aspects of testing and what they can do.

This solution has enabled us to automate in order to tremendously save time. Only first time when you are recording and creating the script will you spend some time with it, the rest of the time, you are just executing. If we do one manual process, it could take approximately two hours. The same process using Worksoft probably takes ten minutes.

It help cut test maintenance time too. An eight hour manually project using Worksoft can be done in an hour.

Worksoft is good for SAP to do your automation and testing.

We are not using it for web UI testing.

The primary use case is regression testing and test automation.

We use this solution for end-to-end testing of packaged applications, like SAP, ServiceNow, and some in-house web apps (which we built).

We have already found some defects using the test automation. 

One of the bigger value-adds that we had was extracting data from our warning systems to be inputted into our new learning system.

We automated because of the value. Our business users do a lot of regression testing. They often don't have the time when we need to get the testing done, so this frees them up to do more value-added work for the company.

• Speed, as far as getting tests completed on time. 
• Its ease of use and the value of that. It is a lot easier to maintain test scripts on Worksoft Certify than on other testing tools that we have had in the past.

We have had run ins with some bugs on Business Process Procedure (BPP) and Execution Manager. 

We also did upgrade Worksoft Certify recently to clear up some issues with server fogging.

More than five years.

It scales pretty well.

I would rate technical support as a seven out of ten. Sometimes, we end up going back and forth with Level 1 support. Usually, if we go back and forth, it is email most of the time, and sometimes it is once a day with 24-hour turnaround. We usually understand what they require and trying to give as much information as possible. We still need to tell them to kick it up to Level 2 support or at least have a meeting with them, so we can show them what is going on. Sometimes, it does get a little frustrating, but once we either have the meeting or get Level 2 support, the issue gets resolved pretty quickly.

We had and still use QuickTest Professional from Micro Focus a little bit, but we were approached back in 2008 about getting into Worksoft Certify.

We went with Worksoft Certify because of its ease of use. You don't have to know a scripting language, like with QuickTest Professional. Also, it has ease of maintenance.

The initial setup was not really complex, just a little. We did not understand the full setup; it was just confusing. We really didn't get a full explanation of how things connected together until we actually started to use it. Once, we start using it, things became much clearer.

During the initial deployment where we received execution suite, the necessary information was not really provided. However, it was a fast deployment. We had to meet some deadlines, so people just came in and did the installs, or helped us do the installs over the phone, then afterwards we realized how things were connected.

We used Worksoft for the deployment, who was very good.

We have seen ROI by being able to free up and give time back to the business for other value-added work.

In 2008, we evaluated SAP TAO. The person who came in to do the proof on concept wasn't able to get the test scenario working at all. He had three and a half days to do it, and he couldn't do it. When Worksoft came in, they had the same length of time and were able to get that one plus another one partially working in the same time frame.

Worksoft generally seems to want to make sure you are successful at what you are trying to do. I haven't come across an employee from Worksoft that isn't willing to help. A lot of times you do get that from other salespeople, and that is just not the case from what I have seen from Worksoft. 

The product has a lot of benefits as far as getting testing done. It gives you some value back.

The company is using it across our IT landscape on different projects. We use it to test web applications, SAP mainly. Right now, we're doing a big conversion project. The one that I am working on is a big conversion from an old mainframe system over to SAP. Thus, we are using it to automate all the UAT test cases.

We have also used it in other areas of the company for ServiceNow upgrades and general web design stuff.

For this SAP upgrade or implementation, the business users are creating building blocks in their areas, then they're changing the building blocks into long end-to-end scripts to do a complete end-to-end testing to speed up the UAT. It definitely has a bigger coverage of UAT testing.

• It is user-friendly. We can give the tool to business users, and they're able to use the tool pretty efficiently without a whole lot of training. 
• The reporting features are nice. 
• It is easy to take someone else's work and manipulate it to use yourself. 
  
• It is not heavily code-based, so you can pick it up and automate very quickly.

For Execution Manager, I would like it to be more robust interface and be able to view the remote machines full screen instead of a little window. This would be a great upgrade for us.

I would also like more customized reports without having to print out big reports.

It is a very stable product. When we have had upgrades, it's been pretty seamless. Older versions of our scripts work in the newest update without a lot of rework.

It is very scalable with users. We have business users who are scripting. We have Worksoft developers who do more complicated work. Then, it moves over to the people who do execution and process through Execution Manager, so we have several different layers of users doing different tasks.

The technical support is very good. They are very responsive. When we have created tickets with them, there is usually a 24-hour turnaround time, then we are contacted back. Their interface is good for back and forth communication.

It is not practical to do manual testing anymore due to the volume of it. The amount of data variations is too great to test manually. If we were going to do it manually, we definitely would not have full coverage, where now we can get pretty close to full coverage on our tests.

When you are implementing Worksoft Certify, it is probably best to bring some Worksoft consultants in to help get you setup, and set it properly. Because if you don't get your initial systems, like your folder structures and your naming conventions, set at the beginning, there is a lot of rework to get it to work. We did have to go through that.

We save probably 50 percent of our time. The tool does what it's supposed to do, and we are able to actually work.

Worksoft Certify is a good product. The customer support is really helpful and supportive. They are always upgrading their products to new features, which we like. It is a pretty stable tool, which doesn't require a lot of maintenance.

Our environment has SAP Fiori. They are also doing a HANA implementation. As far as the web, I don't work on that side as much.

I haven't used the Capture 2.0 very much.

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.

My company brought on Worksoft to assist us with an SAP upgrade in order to make it so the testing was less stressful for business users through automated testing.

We configured Worksoft to setup our SAP testing environment after a refresh by regenerating all of our testing users. This sets them up with the right access, the right approvals, and everything on the back-end so we can do our scripts the next night.

The Capture 2.0 feature recording the process automatically as you go through. It saves everyone a lot of time. It allows the business to give IT the process they go through without having to spell it out so it can be recreated as an ongoing test.

There is a learn functionality where Worksoft learns applications that would be nice if Worksoft expanded its support for other applications that aren't web-oriented.

We have had some stability issues just getting stuff setup. It seems to be pretty stable outside of the web UI. We have had some issues with our testing running into nightly backups of database backups, etc. That has caused some issues, but when we get everything ironed out in a nice, controlled environment, it seems to be pretty good. The web can be a bit finicky sometimes, but it's just that the response times aren't always the same. So, it's a little harder for it to be resilient.

The scalability is really good. We had just talked with Worksoft about if there were any limits in terms of how long your scripts can run for or how many can be running at one time on the database. It seems the only concern is the hardware that you are running it on.

We ran into some issues with the version that we were on during the initial setup. We ran into a bug on one version, then they upgraded us to a new version, and we got hit with another bug. So, they had to put us in a beta. That was a little frustrating. However, besides the bugs that we ran into, the install was pretty straightforward.

It saves us time. It makes it so we are not as worried about changes which are going into the system. We know that we have nightly runs to ensure that things are working. In general, with upgrades, we can always rely on the testing to make sure that certain business processes are working. If they do stop working, we know when/where and can tie that back to changes in the environment easier.

Our eCommerce platform is Hybris. We run end-to-end tests where we place orders in Hybris, then we validate the order in ECC. Additionally, when an order is placed on Hybris, our QA environment has a lot of things which the SAP analysts have to prepare to get an order ready, so it doesn't clutter up the system, such as creating deliveries. Worksoft can do this for us as well.

Hybris is out most modern application. Our point of sale system is web-based, and it is in web form. We are on Azure. One of the things that we've been able to do is use Jenkins to put our Azure machines on business hours. We tell them to turn it off at 5 PM, then we tell them to turn it on at 7 AM. This has saved us about 62 percent of computer operations.

Prior to Worksoft, there were three different individuals within the company who worked collectively for about three years trying to automate just one of our smoke tests for our point of sale system. A lot of them got pretty far, but they weren't able to finish. However, with Worksoft, we have been able to automate six of our smoke tests in four months.

The most valuable feature is having a no-code solution for automation, so our QA team and some of our business users can work on automation. Then, they don't have to be developers.

Most of our SAP analysts use LiveTouch. They use LiveTouch along with prebuilt components. Our QA team uses LiveTouch when they need to add things.

I would like to learn how to get better logs for their support team.

It is fairly stable. We have run into some intermittent bugs off and on that we can't explain. Since they are typical Window's stuff, you just kill them.

When it is unstable, there will be times when a test that we are running in Certify will just stop, and it will say, "Aborted." There will be errors. There will be no explanation as to why it happens. It has now happened maybe one out of 20 times. When it happens, I just tell our QA team to stop Certify and restart it, hoping we don't see it again.

Scalability is throttled in part by the system that you are testing. So, how much testing can your system handle? 

I think they came out with a different type of licensing specifically for testing. Therefore, you don't have to use a more expensive user license, you can use an automation license. So potentially, if we had 100 use cases, we could spin up a 100 different machines, have them all run and be done in five minutes. That would be the goal, but I don't know if that would actually succeed or not.

For the couple of the issues that we were really scratching our heads over, we were in communication with the technical support several times, but they never got back to us. The issues are not critical because they're not really blocking anything. They're just annoying.

We needed a first step in order to get into DevOps. The first step was being able to automate our smoke tests and regression tests. They are tests that we use to make sure that our SAP environments are viable and our point of sale system. We chose Worksoft because they were the only people who we could find which were capable of automating SAP right out-of-the-box.

We needed a faster feedback loop. We have a third-party who develops our Hybris application for us and wanted to be able to hook into their Git repository, so when they push a new version, it would automatically deploy and run our smoke tests. Then, I can know within ten minutes if it works.

The new environment was pretty straightforward to set up. There were four servers, and maybe a fifth one, if you wanted to have a separate server for automation testing.

Some of the integration depends on the subject matter expertise on your team. How well do they know ECC and their processes? Then teaching them how to use Certify to build out their processes. So, on a scale of one to ten, it is probably a seven if you are not familiar with some of the development principles, like looping. If you are not familiar with them, then it will become more difficult to build out processes needed. This is just understanding the methodology of doing certain things, not Worksoft specifically.

The IT department and I worked with a Worksoft deployment engineer because of all of our Worksoft infrastructure. She walked us through setting up the database in SQL and the MongoDB with Worksoft Analyze. It was a pleasant experience. Most of the issues that we ran into were because I did not know something.

Because we haven't built out our suite of tests yet, we haven't saved that much time. However, we know that it will allow us to save a lot of time and money, because once we are fully DevOps, we'll be able to spin up and spin down our systems on demand. Then, we will know within 30 minutes whether the system deployed successfully or not.

We did not evaluate any other vendors. We didn't find anything else that did what we wanted.

if you can use Azure or AWS for your Worksoft infrastructure, then use that for ease of deployment. Once you have your environment, then you can save it using Infrastructure as Code. Thus, if you needed to rebuild or repurpose it, you would be able to do it.

We haven't taken advantage of all the current functionality.

We hardly use the Capture 2.0 feature at all.

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.