Automating ServiceNow testing increases productivity by 1/3

Once a year, the Service Management team upgrades ServiceNow to the latest version. Testing the new platform consumes a large part of the team’s resources. To reduce the time it takes to complete the upgrade, the Service Management team turned to the Quality Assurance team for help. Together, Quality Assurance and Service Management joined forces to automate 60 of the 114 test cases for the incident management function on the ServiceNow Platform. On average, the manual testing process took three weeks. Testing preparation and execution took a total of 57 resource hours for the 114 incident test cases.

After three months of development and testing—and just in time for the next ServiceNow upgrade—the automated test cases were completed. The upgrade was a success and the automated testing paid off. Service Management compared the effectiveness of manual regression testing versus automated testing and brought the total resource hours down to 37.

In addition to the time saved when executing the tests, the new process made it easier to update the test cases, streamlining the testing preparation. Standard field values were set up as variables, so test administrators can now update the variables in one location. This updates the variables across all locations. The implementation of automated testing has resulted in a 36% reduction in preparation and execution time.

The new process has resulted in a significant increase in productivity, and a decrease in the amount of time Service Management spends on regression testing. Both teams will continue to work on automation to further reduce their testing footprint for ServiceNow.