ServiceNow’s Automated Test Framework is the Next Big Thing – Supercharge your QA Management

[Deepa1]

In the present era of continuous delivery, innovation and implementation of new testing methodologies is vital to organizations that are trying to stay ahead of the curve. To meet this demand ServiceNow’s out-of-the-box Automated Test Framework (ATF) simplifies and expedites the testing process.  Moving forward, we will see why ServiceNow’s ATF is an indispensable tool for your business’ development, and how it can provide your team with a competitive advantage.

ServiceNow’s ATF in a Nutshell

In general, automated testing is the utilization of software to execute tests and compare the actual results to expected values.  Manual testing, which requires human beings to perform the same actions, can be a cumbersome process for any software development cycle; consuming time and money that can be directed towards other activities. ServiceNow’s ATF is an out-of-the-box solution that can be directly applied to the platform and its functionalities. It enables uniform and consistent repetition of testing for customizations in development, and helps identify areas for correction during upgrades.

As you introduce ATF to your instance, you can use test scheduling run automated tests between each cycle. Unlike the time consuming and error-prone traditional method of running tests manually, test scheduling allows testing to be done in parallel to, aiding in earlier detection and remediation of bugs, and time savings.

The Importance of Embracing ATF

If you want to move your application into production in no time, automating testing is the best way to go, due its many conveniences. UI testing is conducted in a way that mirrors the end-user experience. With test suites, you can organize your tests into logical and hierarchal grouping. ATF also automates all tracking and logging of test runs and results, helping users more quickly identify causes of test failures.  As an administrator of ATF, you can make use of the consistency of the machine-based execution, ensuring faster and more repeatable verification that is relatively free of human error. As a result of delegating the rote monotony of manual testing to the computer, you can complete testing faster, and free up your developers to do more critical development tasks; this accelerates your development cycle and saves both time and money.

Accomplishing your goals with ATF

Practitioners have observed that upgrading ServiceNow is not a rosy activity as it was supposed to be; it was found out that the issue is not with the upgrade itself but with testing. The major impediment was that manual regression testing carried out for important releases, was only able to locate upgrade-related bugs sometimes only weeks after an upgrade was complete. This burdened the developers and system administrators and hence, delaying going live. ATF reduces this burden of testing for major releases and supports the functionality for your business needs through an unrestrained upgrade to the most recent version. It does that by allowing you to pre-configure test suites ahead of upgrades. It tests for instances and allows you to test at any point of the development process. All the updates can be automated to avoid human intervention, such as test retrieval, preview and execution processes. An added benefit is that the testing processes are documented and recorded for future reference purpose, which helps to save time for innovations.

ATF helps with the mandatory quarterly patches and testing of customizations in mission-critical applications like incident management. It helps in performing regression testing without any disruption for new development features and enhancements, allowing you to run test for the applications, and locate defects faster.

The Building Blocks of ATF

Although simple and small in number, the main components of the ATF aid in the systematic automation testing and ease of ease. On a high-level, these components are:

• Tests… are composed of a sequence of test steps that handle complete actions using such as incident, problem change management, and service catalog.
• Test steps… are individual manual actions applied to your instance like impersonating a specific users or role, setting specific field values.
• Test suites… are the logical grouping of test cases together in an executing order to perform end-to end-testing. 
• Test templates… are pre-defined sequences of unconfigured tests steps to add all individual test steps in proper sequence facilitating the development of the test and keeps them consistent and standardized. 
• Scheduled test suites… are the scheduling of test suites for periodic automated test runs, and are available from Jakarta.

Best Practice for Best Usage

To reap the potential benefits of the automated test framework, it is important to follow the best practices of always performing automated testing in your test or development instances. Configuring ATF designers, administrators, and test runners’ ServiceNow groups, configuring ATF test users such as ATF incident, change and end user, and running the test runners in your own browser window are some of the best practices. These are the mightiest way to practice ATF to bring about efficient testing process.

The ROI factors:

Beside saving time and money through the ServiceNow ATF, there are lot more meritorious considerations which influences high ROI

• ATF implementation has a considerable impact on the ROI. Although documentation and configuration of automated tests simultaneously during initial stages elongates the setup period (when compared to manual testing), you will quickly make up for time and greatly surpass manual testing in terms of time savings with every test run.
• Unlike the physical action of documentation and result logging, ATF pre-configures all tasks, which lessen human intervention. 
• While a manual process sees a mounting increase in time with respect to the complexities, ATF attenuates it. 

Advantages of ATF 

ServiceNow ATF brings in significant number of advantages that fetches quicker results during implementation and updates. It provides a wide range of benefits as follows: 

• Since it is a built-in framework you are provided with 24/7 customer support.  
• It requires no additional installation and is free-to-use.
• ATF provides up to 70%+ of the test cases coverage with minimal customization.
• Tests creation and maintenance is designed to be just as easy as creating any other record, making it accessible to both non-technical and technical staff
• Parameterized testing with multiple data reduces test cluttering and redundancy (as of Madrid)
• Test functionality is intuitive and directly related to ServiceNow use cases such as: impersonating users, opening up forms within ServiceNow, setting fields and validating forms.
• Inspect pages and test custom UI components automatically with ATF (as of Madrid)
• It minimizes human intervention, minimizing testing errors and saving an enormous amount of time compared to manual point-and-click testing. 

How a company leveraged ATF for their success 

Let’s look at an example of how a hypothetical company leveraged ATF. A software development company was unable to populate work notes while changing the Task states.  With ATF, they were able to easy locate the issue with the work notes, and  automate their portals and catalogues. Having incorporated this framework, they were able to yield tremendous benefits in areas such as:

• Finance: cheaper automation tests than a manual test.
• Quality: ATF does not affect the caliber or standard of the output by eliminating human interventions and geological hindrances.
• Peace-of-Mind: ATF will help verify issues immediately, and can be re-run in the future to ensure continued viability during upgrading 

Madrid and Beyond 

ServiceNow’s ATF breaks down barriers and pushes applications more quickly into production by automating testing of forms, service catalogs and more. Automated test framework enables you to easily create and run tests on ServiceNow instances automatically. It is essential to run these tests to check if it is in par with the design requirements at during initial development and instance updates. The latest Madrid release offers new features enabling easy test creation and use case coverage. For example, you can run the same test with different data for different scenarios as you create parameters and store them. You will also be able to test a number of non-out-of-the-box HTML components in a page. Lastly, test suite filtering allows for easier suite creation by allowing users to add multiple common tests with fewer clicks. 

Overall, ATF has a lot of potential to simplify the test handling process in the development and testing stages. It is evolving faster than we could imagine, and ServiceNow is continuing to support and expand test coverage. In fact, the upcoming New York release can expect to bring even more value your business team business teams.

If you are looking for the best way to improve the quality of management in your business, add automated testing to your design process now. Would you like to know more?