Never Write ServiceNow ATF Tests Again? | Test Agent & Auto Maintenance Demo

[Earl Duque]

Nobody gets into development because they love writing test suites. You do it because the pipeline needs it, and because the alternative is finding out in production. The Brazil release brings two things aimed squarely at that chore: the Test Agent and Auto Test Maintenance.

On our latest Developer Passport stream, Product Manager Ravi Mantrala walked us through how AI is getting wired directly into the Automated Test Framework (ATF).

What's new with ATF

• The Test Agent: It sits alongside the Build Agent and authors, executes, and troubleshoots your tests. Rather than burning 20-plus minutes on a single test from scratch, the agent reads your app and generates a suite of functional and UI tests.
• Auto Maintenance: You know the feeling of shipping one change and watching a dozen tests go red. Auto maintenance detects drift when you modify your application, then updates the tests that still apply, writes new ones for the features you added, and deletes the ones your business logic no longer supports.

Seeing it in action

Ravi demoed this on a custom food truck ordering app. He asked the Build Agent to add a new menu item (Chicken Biryani) and pull a new-customer promotion, then the Test Agent took over. With no extra prompting, it reconciled the whole suite: it updated the UI tests for the new menu layout and deleted the promo tests that had nothing left to test.

Working with existing apps

A question came up during the stream: can you use this on apps you've already built? Yes. The agent does its best work with Fluent apps, since the built-in documentation and schema awareness give it a lot to go on. Native, non-Fluent apps still work, you just have to be more descriptive in your prompting and walk it through your table structures and naming conventions.

Try it out

Both features ship with the Brazil release, and they're available in the ServiceNow Store right now if you're on the August release version of Build Agent. Otherwise, watch your Personal Developer Instance upgrades on the Developer Portal over the next few weeks.

Watch the full episode (embedded above) for the live demo, and if you haven't grabbed your free pass to now[dev]26 in San Jose this November, now's the time.

What's the test suite you've been avoiding? I want to know what people might point this at first.