To stay agile and responsive to the needs of end users, organizations across the globe are embracing cloud enterprise applications. Cloud enterprise applications like customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, ERP systems, Supply Chain Management (SCM), Human Resource Management (HCM) and Financial Management solutions offer real-time visibility into data, and other actionable insights to make data driven decisions. Since enterprise apps are the lifeline of any business, it is critical that they operate seamlessly. This is where testing comes in.
The Need of Efficient Testing
Termed as a colossal misstep in the channals of banking, Citibank incurred losses exceeding $500 million as a result of a botched Oracle Flexcube ERP implementation. Inadequate testing is attributed as one of the factors, as even experienced business users who routinely conduct such transactions were unable to detect the flaw.
- Quality Assurance: Efficient testing can help in identifying bugs in the early stage of software development. This will significantly reduce the cost and lead to a higher quality software.
- Product Reliability: Robust testing ensures that a software is stable and meets the requirements of end users. Stable product improves user experience and leads to productivity and efficiency in an organization.
- User Satisfaction: If user acceptance testing is given proper attention then it leads to higher software adoption. Enterprise applications like ERP and CRM require proper change management in place for better adoption. Otherwise whole digital transformation initiatives may fail. By placing thorough testing strategies including UAT organizations can easily manage change.
- Compliance & Security: Testing plays an important role in avoiding hefty penalties that may come due to breach of compliance and security. Testing ensures that software complies with industry standards, regulations, and security.
- Risk Mitigation: Testing is critical for risk mitigation. Robust functional, security, and performance testing ensures that mission critical business processes will work seamlessly without any disruption.
Manual vs. Test Automation
- Manual testing is time consuming and prone to error. Manual testing follows the waterfall and is performed at the end of the development phase. When bugs are found at the end of the development, they consume a lot of time and rethinking of strategy. Test automation can solve this.
- In this era of agile, enterprise software vendors like Oracle, Dynamics 365, and Workday roll out updates more frequently than ever. For instance, Oracle rolls out quarterly updates, Dynamics 365 biannual, etc. Manually you cannot keep up with the frequency of updates. However, test automation can solve this.
- As organizations have started practicing agile forms of software development, leveraging manual testing approaches, QA teams cannot keep up with the pace of development. Test automation can solve this.
- Manual testing approaches cannot ensure adequate risk coverage. Since it is based on guesses and experience, it cannot be considered as a logical approach as it often leads to execution of redundant test cases that don’t contribute significantly towards coverage.
Test automation is considered as a logical solution to these problems. Test automation speeds up the testing process, eliminating guesswork to ensure adequate coverage. However, there are still certain challenges while implementing and maintaining test automation. Some of the highlights are listed below:
- Business users play a critical role in ensuring risk coverage since they are the ones who know critical business processes most. However, if you opt for code based test automation, they’ll find it difficult to embrace because they are non-technical folks.
- Most code based test automation platforms operate using locators. Since enterprise apps use dynamic locators, test scripts become fragile and require huge maintenance effort.
- Creating test scripts for code based platforms requires huge effort along with programming knowledge. So, you need resources with programming and testing knowledge. Finding the right resources can be a challenging issue.
Addressing Test Automation Challenges With No-Code
No-code test automation is considered as a viable solution to above stated problems. The reason being no-code test automation platform can be operated easily and also contributes towards test coverage. Let’s see how:
- No code test automation platforms leverage Natural Language Processing technique. This is a subset of AI that can mimic human actions. This can be used to create test scripts without requiring programming knowledge.
- With the help of no code automation, business users can participate in testing. Since they are the end users and have proper knowledge about critical business processes, their participation will significantly contribute towards risk coverage.
- Since no-code test automation platforms leverage AI, the scripts get healed up automatically without requiring human intervention. Thus, reducing the test script maintenance efforts.
