In response to your queries above please see my response.

Worksoft offers innovative and comprehensive solutions to optimize lifecycle management for SAP® applications. Worksoft solutions are specifically designed to meet the unique architectural needs of SAP application environments and the specific needs of both business and technical users.

Worksoft customers typically realize faster deployment times for SAP upgrades, gain better visibility into the impact of business process changes and reduce their risk of performance and availability issues.

The Worksoft lifecycle management suite delivers a comprehensive and integrated solution for managing the impact and risk of recurring changes in your SAP environment by providing:

* Lifecycle management solutions that enable both business process experts and technical SAP users to assess, analyze, validate and document the impact from business or environmental changes.

* An object-oriented approach to testing resulting in a code-less solution that is more functional and more reusable than traditional automated testing products.

* Cross-platform business process validation that spans multiple application platforms including SAP, HTML, Java, .NET, Windows, Unix, iSeries, Mainframe, Peoplesoft and other packaged ERP applications.

* A comprehensive solution portfolio that spans the entire SAP change lifecycle including: impact analysis, functional testing, performance testing and auditing.

More specifically, Worksoft Certify fully eliminates custom coding and programming, a requirement of most legacy test automation products, making it fast and easy to implement and maintain. Using an object-driven approach rather than generating scripts or code, Worksoft Certify validates business process workflows using a data model of fields, screens, and transactions making it easy to keep pace with dynamic changes.

Worksoft Certify supports a vast array of applications that span these platforms and interfaces: All SAP interfaces, web-browser, web services, Java, Microsoft .NET, mainframe, Visual Basic and more.

In response to your question on Worsoft’s relevance in the testing space, Gartner places Worksoft as a visionary for delivering leading-edge, script-free test automation tools and our leading support for testing SAP applications. Although we have the ability to
test general applications, our focus during the past two years has shifted to SAP testing, and users of the product are finding that they can drive very high test automation coverage and have
maintainable scripts. The toolset has integration to both SAP Solution Manager and the
IntelliCorp suite, enabling an integrated change impact analysis and validation loop.

Our pricing is very competitive and you will find that the ROI of our solution is unequaled in the market today. I would be very happy to discuss this further with you if you so wish. Feel free to contact me at the coordinates below.

David Milette
VP International Sales, Worksoft

1) Certify is compatible with SAP…we’ve used it on 4.6C and now ECC 6.0. We also use it on various add-ins like Vistek’s products and GUiXT. We use it against our SAP Portal and Web Commerce sites from the internet side.

2) Automated testing is a relatively small space today. Worksoft are very relevant in my opinion.

3) You’d have to contact Worksoft directly for pricing details. We found them competitive.

4) Quantitative: I don’t have hard numbers on the increase in productivity, but I can say that in our ECC 6 upgrade, we ran > 1,300 test cases in < 5 days. In 2 separate testing cycles.

Qualitative: for us, better test case documentation; better testing coverage; automation permits us to run a broader and deeper testing of our changes – that is we are able to test a broader range of SAP functions with more variations of each function (deeper) when we test our changes now.

I would qualify this with the statement that you don’t flip a switch and you get all this goodness. It requires a significant commitment to stay the course when you’re moving to automation. The creation of your test cases is, alas, not automated…maybe some day

BB

I am a SAP senior manager for British Petroleum product, wish to know the following things about your product. Would appreciate if receive your response by today EOD.

1. A brief about your “Certify” product capabilities ( compatibilities with SAP and add ins )
2. How relevant are they in testing space
3. Pricing details
4. What are the quantitative and qualitative benefits of your product ?

Regards
Siba

What I’m chiefly interested in learning is whether you’ve been able to write queries to find the data that your BPT’s need (in QA or production) and then either populate a table or one or more Excel spreadsheets that then get imported into Certify for test execution? Does/Can the Gold Client play a part in building your Certify recordsets?

Glad you dropped by! This post is over a year old, and we’ve come a long way since this, so I really need to put out an update on what we’re doing.

The short answer to your data question is: We purchased a tool from Hayes Technology called Gold Client. There are a number of tools out ther (Applimation, et al) that do this, but Hayes is the one we bought. Gold Client lets us pull down data from our production system (or in our case, a production-like system). We pulled all master data and 1 weeks worth of transactional data. You get to determine what you want to treat like master vs. transactional in a lot of cases.

So, in our QA system, we have a client that we don’t touch, it’s loaded up with that subset of production data…it’s our gold client. We use it to refresh the other 2 clients on that QA box by doing a Client Copy (clopy in our tech groups lingo). We haven’t gotten into a rhythm of doing the refreshes yet, so I’m not really sure how frequent that will be. It takes most of a weekend to do the client copies, so we can’t do it too often.

We have about 1400 test cases that we’ve built. We’re in the process of putting them into regression test batches that can be run overnight. We just got our first 150 test case batch to execute with only 5 failures last weekend. So, we’ve still got some work to do there.

I’m planning to do a new post on this in the near future if you’re interest.

Cheers,
Byron

It’s been pretty slow going, but we now have over 800 BPT’s. We don’t consider them ready for execution until the BP experts (BA’s) execute them from Certify and enter in comments that we’ve added as attributes in Certify. The validation flow has turned into a bottleneck, but we’re trying to work through that and make automation a part of the BA’s regular activiteis so that validation and/or “scrubbing” manual test cases for automation becomes part of what they do everyday.

We’ve been working on our test data strategy and we’re building queries to our production systems (R3, SCM, SRM, BI, HR) to load our recordsets. We’ve started with SRM. Certify doesn’t really have any SQL tools to help us here. Can you share anything about your test data strategy, or what you’ve built to load data for test execution?

I found a Certify Yahoo User Group but am not sure how well known or frequented it is. Sharing information like test data strategy and tips and tricks in Certify would be of value to us.

Thanks for dropping by! And thanks for pointing me to CapCal. I’ll be interested to check it out.

Cheers,
Byron

This is a fantastic review, as one of the founders of Worksoft I can verify that you hit the nail right on the head!

CapCal is like a “sibling” of Worksoft – both of them emerged from AutoTester but took different directions.

It might interest you to see what we are doing with SAP and the Amazon Cloud. We also have an integration with Certify that will soon be announced. Check out our blog at http://capcalblog.blogspot.com.

thanks and keep up the good work!

Randy Hayes
CTO
Capacity Calibration

Thanks for the tip on the Test Factory purchase. I had heard that WorkSoft were working on adding performance testing to their repertoire, but I didn’t know the details. From the press release, it would appear that Test Factory’s technology will be the vehicle for that.

If, as you say, the Test Factory technology is superior to Certify, we can only hope that those advances will not be completely removed from the market, but rather find their way into WorkSoft’s core product.

Certify is certainly not a record/replay technology, and you seem to indicate that Test Factory is. This gives you a lot of flexibility with Certify, though it makes test case building more tedious than Record & Replay. In truth, there is very little in the way of looping and basic if/then functionality that you cannot do with Certify. Some of the members of our team have described building a Certify test case as “programming by point-and-click.” The upside is flexibility, the downside is that flexibility increases complexity.

In a perfect world, and Certify may get there one day, we could Record an SAP test through Certify and then go back and add in the variables, recordsets, if/then forks, etc. That would let you quickly “scaffold” a test case and then go back and make it robust.

On another note, we are half-way through our ECC6 upgrade and things have been going very well using Certify through this process. I intend on giving a post mortem here on WhyPad when it’s all said and done. Knock on wood!

Byron