Test automation that keeps up with your business applications’ speed

Business applications like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems stand as the nervous systems of enterprise operations.  They integrate core business processes, manage customer interactions, and provide a unified view of business operations.

Back in 1999, Hershey's faced a major setback due to a flawed ERP implementation, resulting in a significant loss of sales and profits. Inadequate testing and rushing the go-live during a peak sales season were believed to be a critical factor to the failure. 

Now, fast forward 25 years, and these systems have only become more complex. The stakes couldn't be higher when it comes to these business critical systems. When testing fails, you can imagine how devastating the consequences can be. So, thorough testing is not merely advisable but an absolute imperative. 

The reality of testing business applications today

Testing these systems like SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, and MS Dynamics are complex for a reason. They’re:

• Highly customized: The complexity of these systems, amplified with the extensive customizations to align with specific business requirements, makes the testing process complex and demanding.
• Tightly integrated: These systems rarely operate in isolation. They involve dozens of APIs, middleware, and legacy services. Testing the end-to-end workflows that span across these interconnected systems is highly time consuming and complex.
• Frequent updates: Business applications change constantly. Ensuring thorough coverage is a challenge. Knowing what to test after each change often leads to over-testing (scrambling to “test everything”) or gaps in coverage.

So testing isn't just about validating screens, it's about validating business processes across multiple systems. And in most enterprises, the process still looks like this:

• Business users manually test through critical flows
• Test automation engineers build UI scripts that break quite often
• QA leads guess what to test after every change

Releases crawl and test coverage remains a question mark

The fundamental disconnect in testing these systems comes down to how the process works today:

1. Business users know the workflows best, so they end up manually testing all the new changes. That alone slows things down. 
2. Automation is supposed to speed things up. But in reality, it struggles to keep pace with releases. Scripts often break when the UI changes, leading to high maintenance overhead.
3. So now business users are not just testing the new changes, they're also pulled back in to run regression tests every cycle.

This process turns into a slow, repetitive cycle. It creates an impossible situation where testing can never keep pace with the changes and becomes highly unscalable. 

From script-based to user-based testing

Now imagine if you could capture business users' actions as they navigate complex workflows. These captured journeys are automatically transformed into automated scripts that can be executed, modified, and incorporated into regression suites.

That’s what Katalon TrueTest does.

• Supporting business users: As business analysts or IT users perform their testing activities, TrueTest monitors each interaction as they occur, including clicks, inputs, etc. Once these details are collected, TrueTest uses AI to autonomously generate automated test cases, empowering the business experts to contribute to test automation.
• Reducing test maintenance overhead: Enterprise applications change often. Traditional UI scripts break easily, requiring constant fixes. TrueTest’s AI adapts tests to those changes automatically. This automated maintenance dramatically cuts the effort spent on script updates.
• Addressing incomplete coverage: Business application modules often have some workflows that are not the ones with the highest user traffic, but are business critical (e.g. think about issuing a purchase order vs searching for a purchase order). Traditional QA might skip these low traffic flows due to lack of time. But TrueTest surfaces even these business-critical, low-traffic flows as users navigate through them and lets teams decide if they matter. This reduces the risk of missing business-critical issues in the system. 

AI-powered testing tools like TrueTest can augment your business users’ expertise, allowing them to focus on larger problems instead of manually running the same set of tests every release. Unlike conventional automation tools that require manual maintenance, these agents can also learn application behavior and adapt the tests to changes as the application changes. 

The path forward for the enterprise teams is embracing this change and accelerating release cycles while also ensuring thorough test coverage.

Let's hear Vu Lam, CEO of Katalon, share his vision behind TrueTest: