Intelligent Automation using ServiceNow ATF

August 12, 2020

Introduction

ServiceNow is the dominant platform used by the organizations for IT Service Management. Organizations are using ServiceNow to build digital workflows and drive frictionless business. By leveraging DevOps & Automation, organizations can speed up software release and upgrade cycles.

With two major releases per year and quarterly updates of security patches, ServiceNow, has ensured that the new features are up to date as per the current industry trend and in compliance with the security mandates. However, to ensure that the customer gets the benefit of all these new features and security updates, organizations need to ensure they update to the latest version on a timely basis. The onus is on the individual organizations to ensure all their customizations are tested thoroughly after every upgrade or security update. Some of these upgrades can run into a few hundreds of test cases in an organization. Testing each of these features after every upgrade would typically take a few weeks to a few months based on the number of test cases. Many organizations are building custom applications on top of the ServiceNow platform, which adds burden on testing during upgrades.

ServiceNow has come out with an Automated Test Framework (ATF) from Istanbul version and above, which can automate testing and reduce the time taken from a few weeks to a few days. ATF is intended for Regression Testing and will ensure that your existing functionality remains intact. It enables no-code and low-code users to create automated test scenarios with ease. ATF reduces bottlenecks related to upgrades by reducing manual testing significantly, with minimal business impact and fasten development efficiency.

Benefits of ServiceNow ATF

  • Free and Out of Box (OOB) feature without any add-on cost.
  • Fast track upgrade and development time by shifting manual testing to automated testing.
  • Validate all your customizations with every change/update/upgrade.
  • Reduction of manual errors due to consistency in the way the test cases are run.
  • Reusable and simple to use.
  • Testing can be executed along with development resulting in better quality output.

As shown in the above example, a test case with about 10 scenarios which would typically take 10 hours in a normal scenario would take only about an hour with ServiceNow ATF. This can be achieved creating and running batches of tests with automated test suites. Tests can be grouped together using test suites and this enables to run a group of test cases as a single job.

What is the Automated Test Framework?

ATF is a tool to streamline the upgrade and QA processes by building automated tests to check if software or configuration changes have potentially ‘broken’ any existing functionality. It also means developers would no longer be required to start operational activities like code refactoring to generate new test cases.

Customer Solution

Relevance Lab has helped a large US based Digital learning company benefit from Intelligent Automation of their ServiceNow instance with their ATF. The customer uses ServiceNow extensively for ITSM, IT Asset Management, GRC, IT Operations Management, Vulnerability Remediation life cycle. Relevance Lab has implemented extensive automation of servicenow tickets (Incident, Problem, Change, Service Requests, Vulnerability Incident tickets, CMDB etc.) using their RLCatalyst product. The automation has implemented a number of customised forms, workflows and data schema which needs to be validated everytime a servicenow instance is upgraded. The normal cycle of upgrade would take about a week, but ensuring complete testing post upgrade took upto 3 weeks. To cut down on the cycle time and increase the quality, the entire upgrade cycle and associated functionalities were automated for testing using ServiceNow ATF. This helped in reduction of testing effort of 3 weeks for 400 test cases (104 flows) to 0.5 days using ServiceNow ATF with over 90% reduction in testing efforts and more accurate quality output.

The test cases varied across the below top categories

  • SAML SSO.
  • Okta Provision.
  • User Access Requests.
  • Bot Automation.
  • Asset Catalog.
  • Change Management.
  • Surveys.
  • Contract Management.
  • Asset Management.
  • Knowledge Management
  • Reports & Dashboards.
  • GRC & GDPR.

Conclusion

Relevance Lab is a partner of ServiceNow and helps organizations extract maximum ROI of the ServiceNow Platform. As part of this, we help organizations adopt the automated test reusable framework for all change requests, security updates or even major version upgrades.

For a demo of ServiceNow ATF, please click here.

Tags
Testing
ATF