How to accelerate ServiceNow testing: Simplify, centralize, and improve collaboration

ServiceNow has cemented its position as a business-critical application for organizations of all kinds. As the foundation for a wide variety of IT, employee, and customer workflows across the enterprise, testing ServiceNow is not only necessary, but essential for smooth deployments and quality service delivery.

One of the reasons ServiceNow has become so invaluable is that it’s a highly flexible and customizable solution with over 70 product offerings that help organizations automate repetitive, manual tasks to power their digital transformation. But, it’s exactly this benefit that makes properly maintaining and continuing to evolve the ServiceNow footprint within your organization so challenging.

The challenge: Testing unique, ever-evolving ServiceNow environments

The business-critical nature of ServiceNow means that testing new releases, new applications built on the platform, and custom workflows is essential to making sure everything continues to run as it should. But, this type of testing has traditionally been easier said than done. Specifically, four key challenges exist:

• Frequency of releases: ServiceNow delivers two releases a year and offers support for the most current two versions. Upgrading to the latest release is the only way to stay current, which is important for continued innovation within your organization and maintained support. However, upgrading to the latest release requires testing to make sure that all custom workflows and applications continue to work with the latest changes. Doing this type of testing twice a year can prove to be a big undertaking in terms of time and resources.
• Business critical: The business-critical nature of ServiceNow within most organizations means that downtime is simply not an option. As a result, most deployments have become all-hands-on-deck efforts that require the attention of developers, testers, and business analysts. This focus means that no additional development work can happen during that time.
• Unique nature of deployments: Most organizations have a myriad of custom workflows and applications living on ServiceNow – all of which are typically required for the business to operate smoothly and require consistent, ongoing validation to confirm they’re working properly. This situation can prove challenging if there is no simple way to conduct testing for these bespoke solutions.
• Need for agility: Delivery teams need to be agile to keep up with evolving business needs, change requests, and new workflows. However, it’s difficult to respond quickly to these requests when the process for testing updates is timely and cumbersome. Ultimately, it becomes very easy for delivery teams to become a bottleneck as a result.

The solution: A simplified and centralized approach for testing ServiceNow

To resolve these challenges and continue to reap the full benefits of ServiceNow, organizations need a simplified and centralized approach to testing within the application. There are a handful of capabilities that can help organizations improve testing within ServiceNow to more easily stay current on new releases and ensure everything works as it should — even custom workflows and applications. These capabilities include:

• Alignment between testing commands and the vocabulary used within ServiceNow to avoid confusion and make it easy for all users (developers, testers, business analysts) to run future-proof tests that adapt and continue to run with every release
• A centralized system that offers a single source of truth for all codes, tests, results, configurations, and any other relevant data
• User-friendly tools that offer capabilities for people with varying technical skills so that everyone (including business users who are application owners) can contribute to the test writing process
• A proven development methodology and process that is specific to ServiceNow, which can increase confidence when it comes to testing and ensure better test coverage on an ongoing basis.

The result: More stable, reliable, and faster testing for ServiceNow

Implementing the type of solution described above can do more than just resolve the challenges many organizations currently face when it comes to testing ServiceNow; it can offer a fundamental shift in how this type of testing runs. Ultimately, this shift can lead to benefits like:

• Accelerated ServiceNow deployments: An enhanced ability to deliver digital workflows rapidly and keep up with platform releases. Additionally, faster testing can help free developers’ time to focus on adding more value back into the business.
• Improved collaboration: A common platform for developers, testers, and business analysts will enable all stakeholders to collaborate in a highly agile way to better understand changing needs and deliver solutions faster.
• Extreme flexibility: An easier way to test every single aspect of ServiceNow, including custom workflows. This can give teams full confidence to continue developing more value-add custom solutions on ServiceNow.
• DevOps ready: Enable an Agile delivery for continuous testing and delivery. Increase your deployments by eliminating the manual process of keeping up with change requests and business requirements.

Altogether, this type of approach can provide more stability from release to release, save time and resources and reduce ServiceNow testing time from weeks to hours.

About Tricentis Test Automation for ServiceNow

Tricentis Test Automation for ServiceNow (new to the Tricentis portfolio) can resolve common challenges with testing ServiceNow. It provides the ability to fully automate the testing of ServiceNow applications and workflows, including customizations. It provides a common platform for developers, testers, and business analysts, who can all collaborate with a set of user-specific features designed for each of their roles. This DevOps-ready solution easily integrates with your CI/CD pipelines for continuous testing and enables your team to test up to 40x faster.

Interested in learning more? Watch the webinar, Introducing Tricentis Test Automation for ServiceNow, to see how you can use it to instantly generate test plans and cases based on your ServiceNow configuration, create test cases with an intuitive point-and-click recording tool, and develop tests faster and more easily with real-time test playback.