ServiceNow recently published information about the upcoming Madrid release, which will be available in H1 2019. SPOC cooperates with ServiceNow during the pre-release testing which provides a fantastic opportunity to both see the features and put them to work.
SPOC’s Quality Assurance (QA) lead, Zherald Ametlli, was keen to see the changes to the Automated Testing Framework and he has provided his thoughts below.
Madrid Release – ATF
Over recent years, ServiceNow has evolved very fast. The expansion has brought more customers who are using the ServiceNow Platform across multiple business processes.
The greater usage, together with frequent upgrading and patching, means the need for Automated Testing is growing.
One of the main concerns in every company who is managing test cases is having the time and resources to complete the testing process in an efficient way. That’s no different when testing the platform applications and functionality.
SPOC’s primary interest when completing testing is maintaining the highest quality possible. SPOC’s QA team uses different methods of testing to maintain the quality, according to the standards on a particular project. In most cases, manual testing is completed by the testing team. A growing need for regression testing, after every upgrade or patch, has taken our attention to automated testing.
Based on our experience, manual testing consumes around 40% of the resources and time spent after every upgrade. Writing test scenarios, retesting the solution, working on bug fixes, performing regression testing is very time consuming.
There is an obvious need for automation and thanks to the Automated Testing Framework (ATF) and its features, we are able to perform automated testing easily.
With each recent ServiceNow release, the changes and features of ATF have improved. Currently ATF is able to automate most base scenarios. The solution is free, as no additional licenses are required. Using the ATF, you might cover up to 60 % of your test cases.
Madrid vs. London release
In terms of ATF, London release included:
- Testing the Application Navigator,
- Testing Service Catalog in Service Portal (UI),
- Testing Forms in Service Portal.
These features were very helpful and offered a great approach to the Service Portal testing. In Madrid, there are some new standout features, you can find a brief summary of these below.
Copy test case
This option is very useful when you would like to create a test case and reuse it as a sample or template for another. Perfect if you would like to copy and reuse some, or all of the steps in a test case. The UI action called “Copy Test” provides exactly this function.
Parametrized testing
Now it’s possible to run the same test case multiple times using different data as input parameters. A user can create different parameters to store test data for every test running. In addition, you can easily import data prepared in an excel template and use this according to your scenario.
Example: You create a test case for the Change Management module, where the values for ‘Assign to’ and ‘Assigned to’ groups will be driven by the parametrized fields. There would normally be two separate datasets to test for different groups and users. In this case, you can create one test case and import these data sets to run against the fields. You don’t need to copy or re-create the test case again.
Parametrized Testing with ATF ServiceNow Madrid Release Parametrized testing works with test suites and scheduling too.
Custom UI testing
In my opinion, this feature is the one that was so badly missing. It would have been great if custom UI testing was included in ATF from the beginning…. Why?
Testing different HTML elements in a page is a must. Especially for the service portal but also ITSM processes where you have many additional menus, links and custom pages to test. You must test UI pages and now in Madrid it is possible to do this automatically.
First, you need to scan for the components in the page and then select the right one.
This helps to choose the right element in the page and to continue further with testing. Good examples are the buttons in a UI Page or links in KB.
Page inspector
Helps us to inspect the page and find the right HTML element to be tested. It can be activated from the Developer menu and works in real-time.
Therefore, whenever you open any page and select the icon ‘Inspector’ it will automatically highlight the element you selected, giving you more detailed info about it. There are some limitations. Not every element is accessible and selectable. That said, it’s a good tool to start testing and you should try to utilize it as much as possible.
ATF in ServiceNow Madrid release – summary
I’ve listed some of the main features added to the Madrid release. In my personal opinion, the features are very useful. For real environments, it takes time to set up test cases but you can then run them with a click of a button. The next new features to come in the New York release of ServiceNow, in O3 2019.