What advice do you have for others considering Worksoft Certify?

Worksoft Certify is a great product and brings good solutions. It is cost-effective, but not everyone is willing to pay the price. While it is nice and brings a great ROI, it appears to be a longer-term investment, which is why not everyone is eager to procure it given the issues related to licensing. I would recommend Worksoft Certify as a solution to others. My overall review rating for this product is 10.

Worksoft Certify definitely requires maintenance. There are patch works done for at least the minor changes within the same version so that Worksoft Certify behaves more properly. The patchworks must be maintained for Worksoft Certify for any kind of versions that are upgraded. In this dynamic nature, everything is changing, so whenever new platforms or new versions of platforms are encountered, the current versions may or may not work. In these cases, the maintenance of the current version helps to understand how the tool reacts to particular platform changes, making it easier for a tester to automate their test cases. My overall rating for Worksoft Certify is nine out of ten.

I have not used any AI-powered test prioritization with Worksoft Certify; they do not have any capability, only in version 14.5 did they start this capability. I have been using Business Capture for the last 10 years, so I know each and every product of this tool, including Capture 2.0. My opinion on Business Capture is that it depends on who is using it and the context behind it; if I were to use it, I would choose Certify Capture instead of Business Capture, as Business Capture is generally for business people or functional people. I have used the Continuous Testing Manager (CTM) with Worksoft Certify since the last two and a half years. Worksoft Certify performs very well in complex environments; I have worked with more than 30 or 40 customers using Worksoft, so I know it thoroughly. Worksoft Certify does not require any maintenance on my end; it runs smoothly. Even if I use an older version, it works properly, and only the higher versions get additional features. I would give the support a rating of nine on a scale from one to ten. I rate Worksoft Certify overall at a nine out of ten.

Overall, I would rate Worksoft Certify a nine out of ten.

I can perfectly recommend this product to others because Worksoft Certify is very user-friendly and we can easily automate the test cases. I would be interested in being a reference for Worksoft. The vendor can contact me if they have any questions about my review. I rate Worksoft Certify eight to nine out of ten overall.

I can definitely recommend it to other users. I would rate Worksoft Certify a nine out of ten.

Worksoft Certify has good integration capabilities with third-party tools. For instance, I successfully integrated it with Excel and PDF. Although I haven't used the mobile features, it supports desktop applications well. In my projects, especially SAP, it handled invoicing and PDF verifications seamlessly. It is a codeless automation tool. It allows even freshers to be trained and become productive within a month. Regarding project cost, having a senior resource oversee the automation is feasible, while junior resources can handle the bulk of the work. Although it is a licensed product, it significantly saves time and effort, especially with its internal tools that allow testers to capture and automate steps efficiently. Overall, I rate it a six out of ten.

The usability of test cases and running tests overnight is a definite advantage of Worksoft Certify. This provides great visibility into the process. One notable feature of Worksoft Certify is its support for SAP migration. For example, it fully supports SAP migrations. Many customers use ECC, which is becoming a legacy and must migrate to SAP S/4HANA. You can create your test cases in ECC and run them later in S/4HANA. It saves a lot of time. Additionally, you can perform parallel testing to ensure that the new functionality implemented in S/4HANA matches the legacy system. I recommend Worksoft Certify because of its stability. The company has been in business for almost thirty years, maintaining the same customer base. They have a substantial portfolio and extensive experience, contributing to their reliability and effectiveness. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

A specific feature that I found to be the most valuable in the solution for our company's work processes stems from the fact that it is useful as a low-code automation tool. The tool is good for dealing with end-to-end testing scenarios in our company, and in my organization, we use it for SAP testing. The tool is useful for functional testing, and it did add some value to my company. The tool is useful to automate business workflows. My company used the product to automate the test cases for whichever systems were under testing phases. I used the low code automation functionalities provided by the product. I did not use the scriptless test automation feature of the tool. I rate the overall tool an eight out of ten.

While I acknowledge that it's a good tool, the challenges with support are notable. Despite the tool's excellence and the introduction of new features, the ground-level implementation should align with the promised benefits. In comparison to other tools in the market, some offer superior support and features. However, it's worth noting that it remains one of the best tools for learning, especially for users who might not have many alternatives. Overall, I would rate it ten out of ten.

Different solutions are available per the client's needs, but I still recommend Worksoft Certify as the number one or number two choice for SAP-based applications. For EPC and SAP, Worksoft Certify would be the first go-to choice. Overall, I rate Worksoft Certify an eight out of ten.

I rate Worksoft Certify six out of 10. Before implementing the solution, you need to think about how you will use it because it has so many modules. You should consider how you will use those and do a proof of concept. Worksoft hyped up the process intelligence and impact modules for two years, and they still aren't working for us. Before you buy it, make sure it works in your environment. In the future, I hope they have a more stable product with more internal testing and quality control.

I'm working with Worksoft Certify. I always work with the latest version of the solution. My rating for Worksoft Certify is eight out of ten.

The advice I would give to someone looking to implement Worksoft Certify is this: contact the provider and request what you need to be installed. Once the solution is installed, you can open up the user manuals and start learning it. It is easy to learn and implement a project in Worksoft Certify. On a scale from one to ten, with one being the worst and ten the best, I would rate this product a ten overall.

Worksoft is a good tool to start with as it is a codeless tool. There's no requirement for coding language knowledge. We rate this solution eight out of 10.

Worksoft Certify is in hybrid mode in terms of deployment. Currently, there are 50 users of Worksoft Certify in the company. My rating for Worksoft Certify is ten out of ten.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Choosing this solution is entirely dependent on the specific business requirements, the time required and the budget available. If you are looking for an easy to implement scalable solution, Worksoft Certify is recommended if it works within your budget. I would rate Worksoft Certify an 8 out of 10.

I have approximately eleven years of experience in this industry and over the past few years, I have been working as a senior architect. Worksoft Certify is a good tool, but any tool can perform efficiently if you follow the best practices. If you're not following or utilizing the tool properly, there are chances that you might miss the opportunity. The main challenge with script less automation tools, such as Worksoft Certify or Tricentis Tosca is that you have to implement it along with best practices, and if proper best practices are implemented for these tools from the beginning, they can be extremely efficient and beneficial tools that can help to reduce efforts. I rate Worksoft Certify a seven out of ten.

We haven't bought any projects or use cases to automate Salesforce. Worksoft Process Capture is a tool that captures the user actions. Usually, the functional consultant knows the functionality that has to be automated. We then have to install the feature on his machine for him to use Process Capture. The challenge is, since they will be unaware of the tool, we first need to educate him how to use the tool. Because of this challenge, we aren't using Process Capture right now. I would rate this solution as eight out of 10. We are very satisfied with the solution.

The biggest change was not really the tool. There is the saying, "A fool with a tool is still a fool." That's pretty much true. When you are starting with test automation, you basically have to understand the concepts behind test automation, and you have to learn how the robot does the testing. Normally, your testers are reacting, and they are pretty flexible. For example, if they recognize that something is blocking a storage location, they free up the storage location and continue. If you are doing the same with an automated test script, this needs to be implemented in the test script or logic. This is pretty much the difference. So, you need to be very precise in knowing the circumstances or issues that the tool might come across during a test. You also have to have a big focus on the test data. That's because if someone changes your master data, your test scripts will fail, and you won't be able to differentiate whether the error is on the system side or the data side. You also need to think about how you are building your end-to-end tests. In the past, most of our tests were in the area of functional tests, but for the dependencies between the different functions, we really had to concentrate on end-to-end testing. This is pretty much the challenge when people from different organizations have to work together. There must be someone from the purchasing team and the finance team to negotiate on specific test cases and test data, which really takes time. With Certify, you have a tool with which you can concentrate on the content and the logic of your end-to-end scripts, and you don't need to spend so much time handling the tool. A good piece of advice for someone who would like to use Certify is that do not concentrate so much on the tool. You should concentrate more on the concepts and circumstances, such as how to ensure the stability of your systems and data. Are you going to introduce a pre-prod system, an isolated system, or an environment? That is more challenging than the tool. We are using the Capture feature to capture a sequence of our test. Once this sequence is recorded in Capture, we then transfer it to Certify and continue the development there. The Capture feature is kind of a movie that you create. This movie is transferred to the Certify tool, and you can use a feature called BBP to transfer your test scripts into multiple formats. You can transfer it to PDF or Word format. You can show the process documentation with screenshots in a Word document, but in our company, we are very much standardized and formalized. So, this kind of process documentation is not sufficient. We can use it for simple documentation, for example, for discussing change requests for an SAP system, but for comprehensive detailed documentation, we have tools in place. We have different tools in our company for RPA. RPA is not really in the area of Worksoft. I know that some of the organizations that are using Worksoft Certify for automation are also using it for RPA, but this is more of an exceptional case. I would rate Worksoft Certify a nine out of 10. I'm pretty confident of and satisfied with this tool, but there is always room for improvement.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this product is to get consulting and on-site training.

You just have to be clear about your processes and define them before going to capture one. If you capture some processes, you can just easily manipulate and merge them to the other processes. It is really easy to use Certify, but you do need to be focused. There is also integration with Execution Manager, which can be useful when you are using Worksoft Certify for scheduling and other things. It is not that easy to work with SAP Fiori as compared to SAP's GUI. It can be used with non-SAP platforms. Overall, the solution is a nine out of 10. For just the SAP GUI, it is a 10 out of 10. For the other tools, like the web part and Fiori, it is about an eight out of 10.

As always, you have to know what you're trying to achieve. You also have to think about how do you model your system-under-test; how it is written, the quality requirements and standards. The key benefit comes from reusable test scripts. When it comes to Certify itself as a tool, keep your eye on objects. If you map something, keep a good inventory so you understand it and you don't put all the objects in one big basket. For me, the biggest lesson from using Certify is that you can do quite interesting and complicated things with the codeless approach. You don't really need a complicated programming language to do testing. Overall, I would rate Worksoft Certify an 8 out of 10. Of course we would like it to be cheaper and more powerful and developed faster. But are there products that I would rate a 9 or 10? I don’t thinks so. It's at the top of the market from what we know about the market.

There are a number of lessons I have learned from using Certify. * When you get started with it, you need to make sure that you have an executive sponsor so that you get the cooperation you need. * Pick up some mentoring services from Worksoft to help you get started. * You need to document your test cases well. Don't just start without good documentation, because then you make mistakes and then you have to rework that particular test script. * Be very organized in the naming conventions and the standards you're using to do the automation. For example, don't shortcut. Fill out the fields that explain what the test objective is. That way, when somebody else comes in a year later and they ask, "What does this test do?" it's right there. Be organized. * Try not to do too much with a single test. We wrote some that were crazy long: 500 to 600 steps because our process was a very complicated process. Step back and think in terms of logical chunks, because a script which is that big is difficult to maintain. You fix one thing and you get 20 percent of the way through and something fails. So you fix that and then you get another 20 percent and something else fails. It will take somebody half a day to fix one script. You can't have that delay when you have 500 that you're maintaining. I would put Worksoft Certify right up there at a 10 out of 10. It's been the easiest package that we've done. The S/4HANA tool that comes pre-written, where we just go in and change our data to make it applicable to us, is pretty simple but it's not flexible enough. You can only test S/4HANA within those four walls and almost nobody uses just S/4HANA. There are always integrations. So Certify, as a tool that works across integrations from one package to another, documents the results, is easy to maintain, and easy to use, is a 10. I have not seen a package that is this easy and we did look at other ones. This one was just head-and-shoulders above them. It's really a fabulous product, I'm so impressed with it.

Overall, this is a very good tool and I recommend it. I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

My advice would be to develop a very good training program to go with it. Also, understand how to build a good structure to allow for success and to limit exposure where people are editing things that they shouldn't be editing. You should also partner or work with other businesses that have used the solution successful. Build up industry contacts who can help you understand where they're going and where they're having problems, as well, with the model they're implementing. The biggest lesson I have learned from using Certify is that you can design it to be way more complex than you need to, and you need to be very careful, when you're designing the solution, to design it in a very simplistic manner. It's almost like code in that it enables you to do things that are very complex, but you need to be very cognizant that you shouldn't always do the most complex flow, and that you shouldn't overly design logic out of any one script. They should be relatively simple. Regarding ease of use, once you understand how to use it you can use it very effectively. But at times it's difficult to understand what the application is doing, what you are actually editing, within the application. So at times, when it comes to certain objects, you might not realize you're editing another object, in a way, unless you've used the application and understand how it actually builds together. It is simple once you know what you're doing, once you understand how all the objects work together, but leading up to that it can be more complex. We overcome that with training, reference documents, and a lot of training documents. We did an intro training with our team just yesterday. We're rolling out more globally, so we're training and trying to have a center of excellence team that can help out with these concepts. For example, they can help design better training to understand, "Hey, when you're editing here, you're doing this." We're trying to do more targeted training to the things we do with our standards inside of Worksoft. As far as the Capture documentation goes, for us, it's almost too detailed. We've actually implemented a custom solution for documenting, because we need something that's simple, almost like what users would experience for test cases for manual testing. We also designed our own solution for that, in part, because we utilize a lot of Selenium-style code and we need to be able to record results that are occurring in that application. We'll call Selenium and Worksoft and we need to have a consolidated results report. We don't utilize, and, just to be clear, we've never purchased, BPP (Business Process Procedure) so I don't know any of that functionality. But with our unique set up, it did not make sense to utilize those reports. The reporting that is built into Worksoft is good for development cycles, developing scripts, but we don't use it for result-reporting, in the sense of whether the test passed or failed. We've narrowed it down into a custom application. While it does allow for good reusability, even if best practices are followed, at times it's hard to identify if you have the same components or processes being built. That can be hard to recognize. For example, there will be duplicate login scripts. The application doesn't seem to lend itself to being easy to manage for duplication of processes. We are trying to put workflows in place on our team to help identify duplication and to reduce it. We do intend to use Analyze as a way to help catch duplicate workflows. We are working towards use of the solution for RPA testing, but our primary charter is to industrialize our testing cycle, and then we can move into something like that.

My advice would be to think outside of the box. If you've chosen to work with Worksoft, you have to embrace the product as a whole. You will find, as with any other product, that some things that don't operate the way you want them to or would have expected them to. But if you teach yourself to view your problems from different angles using the software, then you will be able to come up with the most brilliant solutions. You can do much more with a codeless tool than you might think upfront. The biggest lesson I have learned using comes back to the codeless part. I view myself as a smart guy, but I don't have the proper coding language knowledge. I was working for myself over the course eight years, before working here, and oftentimes the jobs were really cool, but most of the time I had to do Python and this and that. That was always a struggle because sometimes, when you've learned a language but you're not using it for a year or two years and you want to go back, you have to start remembering it. So I was turned down for those jobs. In this case, and we can show the world that it can be done codeless, if you have the proper tools. When I was first introduced to Worksoft and they told me it was codeless, I was really skeptical. I said, "I don't see that happening," because I had been doing this for quite a while and was used to doing some coding. But the tool convinced me otherwise, which is really nice. Overall, it's capable of being used in modern technology environments. I have been using it for six months now and I still have a lot of learning to do. And as a company, we need to start using more of the Certify features, not only scripting and rerunning those scripts. Most of the people who are using it right now in our company already have some testing experience, but it's our goal to have business and IT people use the Capture feature as part of the process for DevOps. We don't do test maintenance at the moment. We started out with test automation. We had to set up a base for the DevOps teams and then support them from that point onwards. So we are slowly moving into the maintenance part. Because we have split the data from the script itself — everything is data-driven — so it should be fairly easy for us to make the necessary changes. I think execution is faster when compared to human hand movements. But for changing or maintenance, I don't know. The solution hasn't enabled us to find more defects at the moment, because we have been focusing on "happy path" testing. We need to get to the end-point of the end-to-end testing. But I believe, and I'm rather positive about this, that if defects are entered into the system, given that our regression test set covers a big percentage of the complete solution, it should be able to find defects really fast. Faster than we can. The Certify users within our company are all in scripting. We're developers. And because we are in a scrum team, we don't have different roles in our team for test automation. A lot of things are being delivered by DevOps the teams, which you can view as functional consultants. As for the deployment and maintenance, a lot of it is outsourced to one of our partners. We do have functional and technical maintenance or support. I'm the technical guy and then we have two functional guys as well.

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.

There is training required with the tool, but it is easy for business user to understand.

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.

Worksoft Certify is a great tool, which is easy to use and maintain, as no porting needed, development, nor high technical skills are needed. Worksoft Certify is a great automation tool for SAP applications. We do test UI. The UI is very dynamic, as it keeps changing, now and then. It's a very critical, where we are using Worksoft to create innovation. However, our goal is to validate financial valuations. The company mainly uses Selenium for CI/CD processes for check-in. Therefore, each time a developers does a check-in, it automatically gives a bill with some pass/fail information, which includes Jenkins. While we are not using the Capture 2.0 feature, it seems like it will be useful going forward with our end-to-end automation.

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.

Test automation is a must for any company. It is not just about the tool. It is about the processes, how you maintain it, run it, and how you respond if you have any issues. The toolset that you choose must support the entire ecosystem for the automation process. You need to have an engagement model, robust lifecycle, and sustainable executions.

We integrated this solution with Jenkins and Micro Focus ALM for continuous testing. While Jenkins integration went pretty smoothly, Micro Focus ALM initially had hiccups.

Experience working with the tool and explore the features of it, because I think the Worksoft Certify is the best and can do anything.

Use this tool. It is really good.

I would recommend Worksoft Certify. It is a library for everything. It supports cloud applications, and the market is moving into the cloud. The Capture 2.0 feature worked very well with the maintenance testing versus the regular development.

If you're looking at automation, it has to be part of your strategy. It's not something you can push bottom up. It's not something you can just do for a project. Automation is how we work. It is the thing of the future. I haven't personally used the Capture 2.0 feature, but we've reviewed it. Worksoft has definitely made it simpler again by putting in comments and adding in some extra things. This has really helped, and our business users have been using it.

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.

Properly staff the testing team before they attempt to do automation. Be aware that this will not be a one-time overnight process. We tried to automate everything in two months with eight people, and it was impossible. We have been using it for so many years that we are really very happy with it. We will be converting to Ariba for purchasing, so that will have to be automated.

Capture 2.0 is good for new implementations or new processes. It's not as useful when you get into more mature automation. Its documentation and automation are fairly straightforward. There is a bit of a learning curve around the Worksoft Certify tool. The best practices, which are lined out by Worksoft, as long as those are followed, then this leads you to understanding the tool and using it in a proper way. If you don't get started off on the right foot, it will be hard to course correct. So, it is vital that they get started on the right foot and understand the best practices. The product's learning curve is relatively good. Automation is only as good as the functional knowledge that is used in order to create it. This tool works extremely well. Manual testing and automation testing are two different animals. You have to look at automation in a different way. Simply taking manual scripts and automating them, and you're not going to get the full value out of a solution like Worksoft that you could if you were to rationalize the testing and come up with an automated approach. When you're manually testing, it's about having the least number of clicks possible. Every click for a human is time. With automation, clicks don't cost anything. You might approach the testing in a different manner. It would take a human multiple times longer, but with automation, it makes sense not only from that specific test case point of view, but also from a reuse factor. When you're going to use a certain business process that you've created, then reuse it for different work streams.

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.

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 ;)

Give them a chance, because you won't regret it.

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.

Worksoft is good for SAP to do your automation and testing. We are not using it for web UI testing.

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.

I definitely recommend Worksoft Certify. We went with a vendor and have seen a lot of problems with it, so go with the best partner for automation. I also want to advise to go with the best practices, as there is a difference technically when you follow the best practices. We have integrated Worksoft Certify with Micro Focus ALM. From ALM, we execute some tasks from Micro Focus Quality Center. Our test maintenance time is really low at this point. In the beginning, we were having around a 30 percent of failure test cases and spending a lot of time on those test maintenance cases. Now, there is less than ten percent failed. We use Execution Manager, and once the execution is done, we spend time on the less than ten percent of failed test cases failed. For the last six months, we have not crossed more than ten percent.

There is an initial mountain to climb, where you have to get all your test cases in order and have the data ready. This will make it a much smoother setup when it comes to having Certify people coming in. I recommend hiring Certify people who really know the software. Once you get it humming, this is where you will see everything you are dreaming of, where you start a testbed one day and within a week your whole testbed is running, then you have figured out all the issues and can rerun it again. This is where you start seeing the benefits of autotesting. We have the Capture tool, but I don't know the version that we have. We are not doing web UI testing for modern applications, as we have SAP ERP, SAP Hybris, and Revitas CARS.

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.

Pick up some mentoring services from Worksoft to help you get started. You need an executive sponsor to help drive acceptance through the organization, so you're getting cooperation from the functional powers that you need. Ensure that you have a good handle on what's your regression suite and regression test scope, and have it well documented so that you can start automating it. If this is well-documented, get your regression scripts automated because you will have a nice, quick return. Every time you have to do regression testing or operational readiness testing, you can just roll them out, which helps drive acceptance. Eventually, you want to get to where you're automating implementation tests. The only danger there is that the implementation solution needs to be pretty stable when you start automating so you're not doing a lot of rework. Getting yourself a good sponsor is critical, an executive sponsor, then concentrate on the regression, initially.

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.

If you have done a market evaluation and have decided to go for Worksoft, my advice is to go for it. I would definitely recommend Worksoft Certify as a test automation tool. The feedback that I get from our stakeholders is that the tool is pretty simple to use. What we usually do is a two-week training, not full time, where the total is about three to four business days, 20 to 25 work hours. From there, most of our colleagues can start working with the tool. Of course, they have questions later on, some difficulties when it gets into special activities. But overall, the tool is easy to use. It's generally found to be intuitive. In terms of cutting test maintenance time with respect to the scripts, that has not happened. If you need to adapt your scripts, automated test scripts are much more complex and more effort-intensive than manual test cases. But this is the nature of the beast. It will happen with every tool. If a screen changes, if a system changes, then you have to adapt your script for manual testing. For a manual script, you just adapt a Word document or an Excel sheet or the like. But if the process flow changes, you have new windows, new options, then you have to adjust your script for each and every provider that you're selecting. The maintenance of scripts is something that I always discuss with my end users and should never be underestimated. We are not using the Capture 2.0 feature at the moment. We are planning to use it in the future. But at the moment, due to the heavy workload on our plate, we haven't had the chance to look into and to roll it out. We are familiar with the concept of Capture and it's a very nice feature because it makes the collaboration between business and IT much easier, and business can be involved in test-automation topics and activities as well. We have three roles in our environment. We have the key players, who are the project managers, the persons responsible for test automation overall in the respective teams. Then we have the test automation engineers who are responsible for creating test scripts and to maintain them; sometimes they run them as well. And finally, we have the executors, the ones who are running the scripts, checking the details and, if something is not working fine, going back to the test-automation engineers and asking for support and help. I rate Worksoft Certify at nine out of ten. I'm happy with the tool, I'm happy with our colleagues at Worksoft. We have a very good relationship, we can bring up everything. There isn't much I can complain about. I'm happy at the moment with Worksoft.

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.

We are using it so far for regression testing. We have reduced 5% to 10% of regression related issues. This is a huge impact on our organization. So that's really quite good improvement in our eyes.

Perform a pilot. Apply it to your app under a test with representative workflow. Understand the process of developing Worksoft Certify tests by doing it. Execute the develop tests multiple times. Can you live with developing the tests for Worksoft Certify? Is there value in the execution over multiple times quickly? Can you justify this effort over the cost of your current practices? If you can, then this incremental step can be leveraged and then take you further into more automation successes and favorable outcomes with Worksoft Certify. Our organization usually tests on beta and production releases of Worksoft Certify so we are privileged to be able to work with the tool ahead of the general market. In that, we experience more issues that would not get out to production releases. Also even after release we work closely with Worksoft Certify support to identify and resolve Worksoft Certify functionality and may receive such priority support than a normal Worksoft Certify client would experience since we have such intimate technical knowledge, experience and relationship with Worksoft and the Worksoft Certify automation tool. Because we are an active participant in a robust enterprise commercial process to help improve the stability of Worksoft Certify (staged releases to select customers to improve quality prior to some production release), I would say we’re contributing towards a good job of keeping up the stability of the automation tool by testing it first hand in our complex situation and environments and responding back with realistic and practical feedback encountered. We accomplish our organization's mission to develop and run diverse, varied and large amounts of Worksoft Certify processes automation and also assist Worksoft mission to develop and improve the Worksoft Certify automation software. When speaking on stability, I refer to the stability of the Worksoft Certify software tool. Execution stability of the developed test scripts (Worksoft Certify processes) is a whole separate concern. Even so, Worksoft Certify also shines here in comparison with other tools. To really address this properly and clearly, you need to automate a small test scenario in an application that is to be tested and compare the tool script execution with another tool to see that Worksoft Certify achieves a high-level of repeatability and resiliency in script execution. Even so, we do work with an occasional problem that comes out in production releases and experienced that the interaction and speed to which the problems are addressed and resolved by Worksoft Technical Support to be extremely satisfactory. I am not sure if this is representative of all of Worksoft’s clients, but we are very happy with their speed and service with which they handle our issues. This contrasts with the unsatisfactory paid subscription support experienced with commercial HP QTP/UFT and IBM Rational tools, and the lack of any support (other than searching the internet and relying on the user and development community) for open-source tools like Selenium and JMeter. Without the interactive and engaging support, some of these problems would be extremely difficult to solve on our own. However Worksoft solutions were technical in nature beyond what a normal client user could identify and resolve on their own. Using the available and comprehensive technical support and educational services increases the likelihood of success and a positive outcome and benefit with Worksoft Certify. Successes with Worksoft Certify will come from meaningful collaboration to address automation issues rather than handling problems through independent or isolated effort (e.g. the problem could have been addressed with another customer and the resolution could have been worked out already. Worksoft support would be in the best position to know the possibility that a solution exists). This is typical of automation tools and the experience of other tools in the automation tool trade. The knowledge and experience is specific to the tools. As such, going to the source who has the most experience is the recommended strategy.