Hosted by UAT Domain Expert, Stuart Bierig, this hands-on test management crash course will provide you with practical tools for accelerating remote ERP UAT.
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[DORI] Hi everyone, thank you for joining us in today’s session. We still have people joining, so, we’ll begin the presentation in a few moments.
Hi!
Today I’m joined by Panaya’s Director of Pre-sales Engineering, Stuart Bierig.
Stuart will be taking you through today's virtual seminar that will equip you with tips and tricks for successful UAT cycles or any other QA or testing cycle that involves multiple users from different teams, lines of business, and different geographic regions.
I am Dori and I’ll be your moderator for today’s session.
[DORI] Before we get started, I’d like to address some housekeeping rules -
We have a packed audience, so, all lines are muted for optimal sound quality
We will be including Q&A during this webinar, so feel free to submit questions in the Q&A box and we can take those towards the end of the webinar if time permits. If not, we can take them offline and answer via email.
As always, this session is recorded, we will of course share the recording with everyone shortly after the session.
OK, so let’s dive into today’s virtual seminar, I will hand it to Stu
[STU] Thanks, Dori!
Hello everyone and good afternoon.
My name is Stuart Bierig, and I am Panaya’s Director of Pre-Sales for the Americas region.
I am very excited to be with you today and I would like to personally thank you all for participating.
In this session we are going to discuss some of the critical success factors needed to run effective UAT cycles – whether your testers are located across the hallway or across the globe
We will then discuss some quick tips on how to solve key UAT challenges.
Lastly, we will show you how a simple yet powerful test management and execution tool such as Panaya Test Dynamix, can help you achieve efficiencies within your testing operations.
Time permitting, I will jump into a live demonstration and show you a few differentiating features in the Panaya test platform.
But before I begin, I’d like to ask the audience a quick question:
Application testing, especially ERP testing, is a challenging task. For UAT, we need to involve business users who are experts at their jobs. These business process experts are usually not testing engineers.
Business users are not always aware of what exactly they need to test, when they need to start, and what level of evidence they need to provide. From their perspective, they desperately need to test quickly and get it over with - to get back to their primary day to day responsibilities
Collaboration is vital in such projects, where testers need to communicate effectively with each other, with their test managers, as well as with the development team for defect resolution.
In today’s challenging times, when most employees are required to work from home, testing teams find themselves struggling with even more obstacles.
So let’s look at 4 key requirements that will ensure effective UAT and greater business agility.
Let’s face it – most business users hate UAT. It pulls them away from their regular jobs and it is usually a complex task. When a non-technical user is asked over and over again to test and retest new features and document each and every data entry activity and mouse click, it can reduce their morale and motivation. Frustrated testers cut corners to save time and reduce complexity. This leads to incomplete testing and errors introduced into production.
Poorly executed UAT is a big contributor to go-live failures. Nobody is perfect, but the Shift Left imperative shows that when a bug is identified in UAT, it takes less time and costs less money to fix than when the same bug is identified in production. Every critical issue identified in UAT can save your company millions of dollars in lost productivity. Turning you into a hero for preventing issues from falling through the cracks.
If a tester has a question during UAT, how do they collaborate with the larger testing team?
And after a tester finishes their job, what comes next?
Do they need to provide their manager with a status update?
Do they need to update the next tester and share test results?
What if they find a defect? How do they document the issue and communicate this to IT?
Many testing platforms have poor collaborative tools and are not seamlessly integrated with defect management capabilities. Seamless collaboration between testers and IT resources is as critical to testing success as overall ease of use.
Test Managers need full visibility into all aspects of a UAT cycle. And they need this information in real-time.
Test managers should not sit and wait until they receive an Excel spreadsheet to review status. Changing facts on the ground have already made that data stale. Test Managers need accurate information, multiple times a day, and in real-time.
When CAB meetings take place with PowerPoint slides and pivot tables, you can pretty much guarantee that the data was obsolete as soon as it came off the printer. And the pretty chart you are looking at is not actionable in any way, shape, or form.
Do you have any idea if your testers are progressing as planned? Or if a new defect is holding them back? Can you quickly drill down to the owners of every open critical defect in your project and send them an urgent message?
The last challenge we want to discuss today is bug inflation. System-wide defects prevent organizations from maintaining an optimal pace of UAT.
Large UAT cycles typically test common processes across multiple scenarios. A single bug can therefore impact multiple processes and their related test scripts. As a result, testers working with related processes end up wasting their time by running into the same defect over and over and over again.
Correspondingly, IT can be bombarded with multiple defect reports about the very same issue.
If your team is constantly opening the same issues for the same problem – you are definitely wasting the time of your testers and IT. This leads to frustration and process inefficiencies.
Wouldn’t it be nice if a Test or Defect Manager can quickly set up a System Wide defect alert that warns a tester of a minor issue BEFORE they start testing?
Or if you could prevent the test steps from taking place if a known issue already exists?
These four value points play a critical role in achieving UAT process optimization. They are not the results of any new methodology and do not represent a new paradigm. They are practical, straightforward, and are rooted in experience.
In the next few slides, I would like to introduce you to Panaya Test Dynamix, a Testing Tool that can comprehensively addresses these points. It provides testers, their managers, and IT developers with an easy to use and truly powerful UAT platform.
Panaya Test Dynamix optimizes the enterprise testing experience. This leads to better testing, more accurate results, and projects completing faster with no nasty surprises introduced into production.
Panaya Test Dynamix is a SaaS-based, end to end test management tool, designed to cut down your testing time by at least 40%. These gained efficiencies enable you to go live - on time and under budget - not just by going faster, but also by going smarter.
The logos on this slide represent just a few of the hundreds of happy Panaya customers who are achieving efficient, remote UAT today.
These companies may span multiple industry verticals and are based in disparate geographic locations. But they all share the same enterprise testing challenges:
Speeding project delivery,
Eliminating go-live errors, and
Reducing testing costs and resources.
Most of these companies came to Panaya after realizing cost and operational inefficiencies when using their existing test platform. In fact, the largest Microfocus QC customer is now running their UAT on Panaya.
The amazing thing about Panaya is that it takes just a few calendar days to:
Provision your environment,
Onboard and train your users, and
Migrate your existing test assets
Panaya’s modern SaaS-based solution makes it easy for you to hit the ground running.
Before we show you how Panaya improves your testing experience, I wanted to share two use cases of large organizations which bested these challenges by using Panaya Test Dynamix for their UAT cycles, as well as Regression and Integration test cycles.
AGC is a global glass manufacturing company based in Japan. They moved to Panaya from an Excel-based test methodology and immediately enjoyed real-time, centralized test management. They eliminated workflow chaos, gave testers control of the process, and increased efficiencies by allowing testers to concentrate on testing rather than on logistics.
Another great example is Bruker. Bruker is one of the world’s leading analytic instrumentation companies. They replaced their testing solution with Panaya and gained efficiency, visibility, and control. In a large project, Bruker successfully managed over 150 testers across 5 separate UAT cycles and reduced test cycle duration by almost 50%.
If you want to learn more, the full versions of these case studies – and many others - are available on our website, Panaya.com.
Now let’s have a look at some screenshots from the Panaya platform as I detail how our capabilities overcome the challenges we discussed earlier.
Time permitting, I will hop into a live demonstration and show you some of Panaya’s differentiating features.
But before I continue, let’s take a second poll from our audience.
Testers love using Panaya.
Automatic notifications provide testers with everything they need to know. Panaya tells testers what to test, when their tests are ready, and what data to use. And when you complete your test, Panaya automatically passes the baton to the next tester.
Just think about all of the emails and text messages that you will no longer need to compose. Managers do not need to chase their team - Panaya orchestrates every step of every test in every test cycle.
Panaya has a unique Test Recorder that automatically captures everything performed in SAP, Oracle, Salesforce or any other application. All of your business processes can be captured with near-zero effort. This includes Web applications and interfaces such as SAP Fiori.
Using Panaya, testers do not have to document their activities. Test evidence is generated behind the scenes, detailed down to every mouse click and key stroke. There is no need to copy, paste and capture screenshots. Panaya does all of the hard work for you. That allows testers to get more done in less time and with less headaches.
Panaya‘s audit-quality test evidence can be easily exported to Word or PDF. Content can be used for compliance reviews and for training purposes, saving the time and money needed to create these materials from scratch.
Panaya enables business process testing by providing a sequence of activities - what we call test steps - potentially assigned to different users from different departments, locations, etc.
We all know of QA teams getting together in meeting rooms or via Zoom and Skype, trying to see where they stand, who did what, and if there are any bottlenecks.
Using Panaya, key stakeholders have all the information they need - all of the time. Test results and auto-documented evidence can be reviewed and approved with a mouse click. This agility provides a real opportunity to improve the way you test enterprise applications.
Testers know what to test, on what system, and what values to use, when they are expected to test, and by when they are expected to finish their test activities.
Panaya is so simple to use that user training takes a few short hours. Contrast our ease of use to other tools, such as Microfocus QC.
If you have amassed test assets in binary formats such as Word, Excel, or PDF, just upload them into Panaya and they will be converted in a matter of hours.
Panaya testers know who tested what before them, and can easily collaborate and ask questions within the platform. There is no need for any external messaging or email software.
With Panaya, test managers enjoy real-time progress tracking, with an all in one, easy to use SaaS solution. You can immediately take action on issues because every number in Panaya‘s real-time dashboards is clickable and you can drill down as deep as the test step level.
No matter where testers and business users are located, you will always have real time data about the progress of their test activities.
You will always know how many tests were completed and how many steps were performed.
You will always know if any tests have failed and are blocking the team from progressing.
Proactive alerts prompt test managers to address unassigned test steps and to examine tests being bocked by logged defects.
Now let’s see what panaya can do for defects and defect inflation.
What you see on the screen right now is the expanded Panaya Test Recorder interface. It runs as a Browser Extension so it’s simply SaaS. It’s look and feel is quite intuitive and can be used by professional testers or end users who have never tested before. Through the recorder, testers and business users can seamlessly report defects through the small defect button you see here on the screen.
A screenshot will be automatically captured and an email will be sent to the developer or the development manager with a link to see all details and steps to reproduce. The screenshot can be edited on the fly to pinpoint the precise area of failure. The defect is automatically populated with the test and step details and you can even review its influence on other tests. If a defect influences additional test activities in the project and not just the originating test step, it can be classified as a System Wide Defect. System Wide Defects save time because they stop other testers from running related tests that will run into the same issue.
Let’s say that an SAP user reports an issue with transaction code ME21N. All other tests against other business processes that use this same transaction code can be instantly paused until the defect gets resolved. Once the defect is resolved, all impacted test activities are immediately released for testing. This saves time and reduces wasted efforts.
System Wide Defects are how Panaya solves defect inflation.
At any point in time, Test Managers can review test cycle status. They receive real-time visibility into how many issues have been reported and how many critical defects are blocking test progression.
As noted before, every metric can drilled into, on multiple levels.
Within a Test or Defect, Panaya users can always collaborate effectively. Email notifications are sent to test owners regarding new comments added into their assets.
Other application users can subscribe to tests and defects - to follow their progress every step of the way.
And managers can easily broadcast a message to the entire team if needed.
In this screenshot, a developer needs more information about a defect. The “Need more information” button opens a window for a message to be sent to the defect creator to request the missing information. An email will be sent to the defect creator with a link to the defect and the missing information. The business user can respond in the same way, with just a few mouse and keyboard clicks.
This is just another great example of how far Panaya went to incorporate useful collaboration elements into its testing platform.
Before we proceed to some Q&A, I wanted to summarize what can be done with Panaya.
Anyone can easily create tests in Panaya. The interface is simple and intuitive. With just a few clicks your tests are ready.
If you prefer, you can import test assets from existing documents such as PDF, Excel, or Word. With the Panaya Test Box, you simply zip up and upload your existing tests. Within 48 hours, Panaya will convert them to tests, steps, and activities within its SaaS platform. This feature is included in your subscription.
When a test cycle is all set up, the Test Manager will launch it. All appropriate users are then notified by email to begin testing. They can open their tests and quickly run them using the Panaya Test Recorder.
During testing, testers report Passed or Failed results and can log defects when appropriate. Subsequent testers are notified only when the previous tester passes their step. The end to end flow is covered via email notifications, dashboards, and reports. Our SaaS solution is of course accessible from anywhere your computer is located, including your kitchen table.
Panaya Test Dynamix can help you standardize your testing methodologies, accelerate test cycles, and allow both IT and business users to collaborate efectively. With Panaya, your projects go live faster and with less errors. This saves you time, money, and resources.
Now its time for your questions! So I will hand it back to Dori.
We use Microfocus QC. Is Panaya that much different from QC?
Panaya is very different from Microfocus QC. Onboarding and training users takes less than a day as the Panaya platform is much easier to use. Panaya’s cloud solution is accessible from anywhere. Panaya is more than a test management tool, it also supports the capturing of complete business processes with a click of a mouse.
Can we reuse test steps in multiple tests?
Absolutely! With Panaya Test Dynamix, your existing test assets can be reused by importing them into the platform. Within 48 hours, they will be ready for you to use within Panaya. Test assets in Panaya can be referenced in other cycles and easily repurposed for multiple test runs.
Do you support agile testing?
We do support both waterfall and agile methodologies, We do not enforce Agile testing but We bring speed and agility into the testing process.
How long does it take to implement this system?
System setup is completed in a few minutes. The onboarding of Panaya users can take from 1 hour to 4 hours depending on the user’s role. Testers who have no management responsibilities can be trained in an hour.
Is there an option to view requirement trace-ability
YES! This is a an easy to use, yet powerful feature of the Panaya platform. You can always trace back from a defect to the original requirement if it’s a business or IT requirement.
Do you have any specific thoughts on how to motivate testers throughout remote UAT within this COVID-19 world?
We have found that motivation is directly proportional to testing tool's ease of use. Panaya has seen companies' UAT cycles fail to uncover mission-critical issues because their testers do not test properly with the non-user friendly tools provided. Panaya Test Dynamix is easy to use and does all the hard work for testers behind the scenes (for example- auto-generated test evidence). Testers love using it and usually run their tests correctly with Panaya.
Are there specific templates for importing tests in Panaya?
Yes. Panaya provides authorized users with two different excel templates that support real-time imports of test assets into our platform. But we also offer our testbox which allows to drop your files in word, PDF or excel and within 48 hours they will be converted into panaya and ready for execution.
What happens when a user is sitting on a task? is there an escalation process?
Bottlenecks can be seen through real-time reports and dashboards. There are collaborative capabilities within Panaya Test Dynamix that improve testing notifications and efficiencies.
Is the configuration of remote users complex?
Not at all, we know that other tools may require comprehensive configuration but with panaya, being a SaaS solution, there is very little to configure. Your users will be executing tests in no time.
Do you have a free trial? Yes we do! We will share the details on how to register for a free trial following this session via email.
We are in a regulated industry and some of our compliance processes are very strict. How do you support us? Sure, our Compliance features include regulated cycles so that no user can execute before complete reviewing processes has taken place, approval of tests, e-signature of runs and evidence, audit-ready documentation, defect resolution workflow and much more. We have many regulated customers who need to comply with different regulations.
Can we reuse the same processes cross countries and adapt it? Everything in Panaya has been developed with the thought of reusing in place. You can duplicate, copy from one project to another. import from other projects into new cycles, copy the data and then change it and much more.
We use Microfocus ALM, can we use our existing scripts in Panaya?
Absolutely! You can use our Test Box to upload your test cases in Word, Excel or PDF and Panaya will create the tests for you within 48 hours. This service is free of charge, included in any subscription.
