Automation Testing for Workday: The Basics
Tags: workday, automation, testing
Published: 2023-01-17 19:07:53

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Workday is a suite of cloud-based enterprise apps that enhances HR and payroll compliance, reduces risks and provides real-time visibility into the financial performance of your company. With Workday being so important to its customers' operations, Workday testing is critical to ensure that application functionality aligns with your goals, supports essential processes, and delivers the desired return on investment. Said another way, testing is necessary for both business continuity and effective use of Workday.

Automation testing for Workday
There are three core use-cases where Workday testing needs to be performed:

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Initial implementation‍
Since your HR and financial teams rely on Workday for their day-to-day functions, it’s vital that it’s set up correctly. Specifically, configuration and security testing are necessary during the initial implementation, along with multiple rounds of UAT to ensure that the software works as end-users intend it to. 

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Read more: Why UAT is the Key to ERP Implementation Success
Customization of tenant‍
Since Workday has exposed its APIs to customers at no additional cost, many customers have created their own functions and native apps to support their Workday business processes. Customers can now introduce new business processes, adjust existing ones, retire old ones, or integrate Workday with third-party productivity applications. Testing is the only way to ensure that these changes do not impact existing business processes. Said another way, each time a customization is made, the functionality of your Workday tenant must be tested.

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Workday’s frequent releases‍
Workday releases two major updates per year, along with occasional updates that contain new features and bug fixes. It’s vital to test your Workday each time these updates are pushed to ensure that existing functionality is not negatively impacted.

The need for automated testing for Workday applications‍
While companies invest a lot of money in Workday to increase overall efficiency and productivity, when it comes to testing the application itself, these same companies are reducing their own ROI by choosing manual testing over automation. This is the exact opposite of efficiency.

In order to truly extract the highest ROI from your Workday implementation, automated testing is a must. Here’s why.

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1. Automating Workday QA testing saves time & money.‍

When it comes to any type of packaged application testing, two common pain points are time and money. Manual Workday testing requires an enormous amount of both. 

Consider all the different types of testing required: functional testing, performance testing, integration testing, regression testing, security testing, and more. 

Automating Workday testing helps you achieve maximum test coverage by eliminating redundancies and repetitive tasks. By utilizing existing Workday tenants and mining data and test configurations, multiple tests can be run autonomously and simultaneously, speeding up the entire process while also increasing test variety and accuracy.

And while the costs of implementing automated testing might be intimidating at first, the long-term savings impact on time, efficiency, and headcount will far exceed the initial investment.

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2. Automated Workday testing increases security and ensures business continuity.‍

With security being top-of-mind for any organization, continuous testing is required to meet ever-changing and increasing regulatory requirements. Automated testing outperforms manual testing in two important areas of security: accuracy and business continuity.

Automated application testing reduces the chance for human error and increases security coverage. It can pinpoint vulnerabilities instantly and prevent potential attacks. Automation also makes assigning role and user-based security permission levels more precise and reduces the chance for data exposure and loss. When user roles change, instant alerts can be triggered to facilitate approval processes.

Also, if we learned anything about business continuity from the last two years, it’s to expect the unexpected. A global pandemic, followed by a great resignation, followed by a current workforce that is “quietly quitting,” plus a looming recession on the horizon are all solid reasons to favor automation over time-consuming, labor-intensive, and inaccurate manual testing.

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3. Automated Workday QA testing gives you a competitive advantage.‍

Automating your Workday testing frees up time so your employees can focus on growth. It frees up money so you can invest in better technologies and increase your product offerings. It also helps you get to market faster than your competitors.

Automated testing grows as your business grows, without the need to hire additional headcount or resources. Whenever Workday adds new features to its product, you can implement them immediately, while the other guy is still bogged down doing manual testing. And, as we mentioned previously, manual testing errors and inefficiencies can cost an organization a lot of money, not to mention damage done to its reputation in the event of a security breach.‍‍

Finding the right Workday automation testing tool‍
Since you’re now hopefully convinced that automated Workday testing is superior to manual Workday testing, let’s consider what you should look for in an automated testing tool.

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A Workday testing tool should be No-Code.‍
To make sure that every aspect of the Workday platform works well, it should be thoroughly tested by end users who will actually be using the system for their daily tasks.

To do this, you must utilize an automation platform that empowers end users to contribute to test automation. As most end users are not technically trained people, you should use a no-code test automation tool that requires minimal training

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The tool should cover Workday end-to-end testing scenarios.‍
Workday is designed to work seamlessly with other apps, and most modern business processes span across multiple applications. When new Workday configurations or customizations are introduced, or there’s an update, these integrations must be tested to ensure that existing functionality still works. 

Therefore, you should choose an automated Workday platform that supports end-to-end testing to ensure these complex business processes are not at risk with each change. Said another way, an end-to-end testing platform is required to ensure comprehensive coverage.

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Case Study: Multinational Construction Enterprise Automates Workday Testing With Opkey ‍
The right automation tool should support Workday releases management. ‍
As we mentioned, Workday rolls out two major releases a year. As such, you should choose an automation tool that understands the impact of these releases on your environment, and intelligently allows you to focus your testing efforts on the most at-risk processes. 

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Your Workday solution should have plug-and-play capabilities for business process testing.‍
To make sure that testing is comprehensive, you should utilize a platform that has ready-to-use pre-built tests, like Opkey. These tests can be applied in just days, and instantly increases your test coverage, which reduces risk and decreases test cycles. 

Conclusion
Automated testing for Workday is important for digital transformation success. Automation testing not only minimizes business risks by testing various end-to-end scenarios but also reduces the stress of frequent releases on Workday customers. With the right automated testing tool for Workday, you can optimize tests for shorter release cycles to make sure testing is thorough, efficient, and consistent.

Automated testing for Workday is critical for digital transformation success. Automation testing not only minimizes business risk by testing various end-to-end scenarios, but also reduces the stress of frequent releases on Workday customers. With the right automated testing tool for Workday, you can optimize tests for shorter release cycles to ensure testing is thorough, efficient, and consistent.