Worksoft Certify Reviews

We are using Worksoft Certify to enable our stakeholders to do test automation on the UI level.

We use it for end-to-end testing of packaged applications. We are part of the internal IT department within our company. Most of the time we are using it on our own products. The products and systems that we get are usually preconfigured and prepackaged and we do additional testing, not just for the functionality for the coding that we add to the product, but also on the prepackaged solutions.

We use it for all kinds of applications. Our focus is the web area, including web-UI testing of modern applications. We have two tools in place: our own internal corporate test automation tool, and Worksoft Certify. The latter is a complementary tool, especially in the web area where there are some white spots for our corporate tool which it cannot cover. That was the main reason why we brought in another tool. And for that, it fits perfectly.

We are able to run our test phases faster. Once the scripts, the test cases, are ready and automated, not only are we able to check our systems or landscapes during the test phases, but we can proactively monitor our development and test systems. Proactive monitoring of our systems is very important for us and was not possible before because manual testing is just too time intensive.

Worksoft Certify helped us to increase time savings. We didn't start test automation in general with Worksoft Certify. We did automation before with our own tool, but it helped us to increase the coverage of test automation and to increase the time savings.

We had a success story with two teams. For the execution of the scripts, we had time savings of 82, 88, 95, and 90 percent. And for the speed, it was between nine and 21 times faster than manual execution.

It's not necessarily saving us money, but it's helping us to free up the capacities of our end users to work on other stuff. Instead of doing testing for two days, they can work on bug fixing, developing new features, etc. That person still gets the same paycheck at the end of the month, so it's not saving us money, but it increases the value of our products. It increases the quality of our products. The reason for that is we are not customer-facing. We are dealing with internal teams and internal products. We are not selling anything to the outside. We are with the internal IT department. For the development teams and the sales team or the consulting team it might be different. But we are not really going out, selling our products and getting the revenue for the company. This is done by other teams.

It's script-free, which is really important for our end users because we are usually dealing with colleagues who are not developers and who do not always have the technical background of developing and scripting. It's very useful that there is a nice UI and the tool is script-free.

It covers all of the technologies we need to cover.

And one big advantage of Worksoft Certify is its integration with SAP Solution Manager, the test suite of Solution Manager, with the certification. That is crucial for us since Solution Manager is our test management tool of choice.

There are a couple of small things, technically, that could be improved.

Features we have asked for include single sign-on. It's a bigger project to make sure that our end users do not have to store passwords, usernames, and the like, for the different tools we have. 

We are also working on an additional integration with another tool that we have in place for lights-out testing. That's ongoing at the moment.

Another idea we brought is that the definitions for the objects need to be automated. They need to be recognized automatically by Worksoft Certify instead of changing them back and forth manually. This is also something that Worksoft is currently working on. 

Updates, in general, is a topic that we are working on with Worksoft on a regular basis. For new products, for new UI technologies when they come out, the test-automation providers need to update their definitions to make sure that the objects are recognized correctly.

It is pretty stable. After upgrades, we usually don't experience any big issues. Of course, it's software, so here and there we find bugs, but nothing crazy, to be honest. The availability of the system is pretty good, almost 100 percent. I don't see an issue here.

At the moment we don't have any issues with scalability. We have about 300 end users working with Worksoft. On infrastructure, it's split. We have a WTS environment, a Citrix environment, for those colleagues who want to use the prepared environment. We have other colleagues who are using the client on their own machines, on their own laptops or desktops. The only thing that we saw at the beginning which we need to change in the future is that, due to the latency, we cannot use clients in the US, for example, while having the server in Germany.

If the latency is over a certain number of milliseconds then it is basically impossible to do automation. That was one of the main reasons why we set up the Citrix environment at the very beginning.

We are still in the phase within our company, or within IT services, of training and spreading the topic of test automation, overall. So our coverage, at the moment, is not the entire organization, it's only the IT department. Once we have done this - and it will take at least another year - we will see if we spread using Worksoft and our internal corporate tool as a combination, or tool ecosystem, further into the organization. But this is not our not our team's responsibility so it's not really in focus at the moment. We are pushing for test automation in our teams and there is still a huge demand for training and new teams coming into the topic of test automation.

In general, technical support is good. They are collaborative and responsive. The only thing I don't like - and this is the only complaint I usually have for Worksoft - is that the first-level support is not always the best for working on topics. We sometimes need to escalate to second-level support and then we know that we are getting a colleague who is aware of the issue and is not just playing for time.

We already reported this to Worksoft and asked them to find another way or to educate the first-level support or to make sure that the tickets go directly to second-level support if they come from us. The guys on our end who are reporting the issues sometimes know more than the first-level support.

When it comes to second-level support, we are happy. There, we know we will get the help that we need. The colleagues are responsive and very helpful and, from a quality perspective, they are very good.

In the beginning, there were some issues with the integration, it didn't work the way we wanted. We spent some time with the Worksoft team, with the support and engineering team, in adding some enhancements to adapt the solution to our three-tier Solution Manager landscape. But that worked very well.

We have a very good collaboration and relationship to Worksoft. For example, every two weeks we have calls with them. We'll provide feedback and they take it seriously. They usually provide us with updates, with enhancements, with new functionalities that we need. That's working pretty well.

We started with manual testing and then we started the test-automation initiative. We started with our internal corporate tool and then, as I mentioned earlier, we figured out that we could not cover everything with that. At the end of 2015, we started to check the market. We did some PoCs and we decided to go forward with Worksoft Certify.

There were a number of reasons we went with Worksoft Certify. The Worksoft team did a great job. They came to our headquarters and did the PoC, showing that the tool is suitable for our needs. They did another PoC with our operations colleagues who were running the regressions testing in Singapore. And then there were the technical requirements that we had. Worksoft Certify was able to cover all of them, some of which I have mentioned already: Being script-free, being fully integrated in Solution Manager, and being able to script in a modular way. And finally, the integration between our own internal tool and Worksoft Certify was also important.

The initial setup was pretty much straightforward. I cannot give you too many details because I did not take care of the implementation. But I know that it took us about two weeks to set up the whole infrastructure. It was not really difficult. And we had very good support from Worksoft, from the support and engineering team. They helped us in setting up the database, setting up the connections. It was not a big deal. In total, within two to four weeks, everything was working fine.

On our side, we had a couple of staff members involved in the implementation because our team is the application owner. We had to involve two more colleagues from the database team because we don't have all the authorization stuff, for the databases area, for the servers etc. In total we had about three staff members involved, but not full-time. It was about one work-week for each of them.

Maintenance is done by myself and one of my colleagues, with the help of our database and server/infrastructure team. We don't have authorizations for everything and we are not database experts. There are three or four staff members taking care of maintenance, as part of our job; it's not a full-time job, obviously.

Whenever we need to do a full upgrade, when we need to plan the downtime for the production system, we try to make it on the weekend. I also already recommended to Worksoft that it would be nice to have something like an offline update where the system can be upgraded or smaller changes and fixes can be included without having full downtime. For an upgrade we usually need two to three hours. Afterward, we do a bit of testing, so upgrading takes about half a day.

It was just one or two people from Worksoft and three guys on our side.

We get feedback from all areas that the return on investment is there. Not just regarding time savings, but also cost-reduction. The return on investment in one case was reached at something between five and six runs, which is pretty fast, especially in an Agile environment.

What is also very important for us here is the avoidance of human error during the execution of tests. Usually, if someone is sitting in front of a laptop and doing testing eight hours a day, he or she will make some mistakes. This does not happen with a tool. Another important factor for us is the availability for testing. Usually, it's pretty hard to plan a test phase to bring all the testers to the table and get the time blocked off for the test phases. For the tools, we just need the systems up and running and then it's a matter of minutes to set up the test plans and to run the tests.

At the moment we are rolling out Execution Manager.

At the time we decided to bring in Worksoft Certify, we looked into two other tools. The key difference was that Worksoft was script-free. That was not the case for other tools. And the full integration to Solution Manager was one of the key differentiators between the tools.

If you have done a market evaluation and have decided to go for Worksoft, my advice is to go for it. I would definitely recommend Worksoft Certify as a test automation tool.

The feedback that I get from our stakeholders is that the tool is pretty simple to use. What we usually do is a two-week training, not full time, where the total is about three to four business days, 20 to 25 work hours. From there, most of our colleagues can start working with the tool. Of course, they have questions later on, some difficulties when it gets into special activities. But overall, the tool is easy to use. It's generally found to be intuitive.

In terms of cutting test maintenance time with respect to the scripts, that has not happened. If you need to adapt your scripts, automated test scripts are much more complex and more effort-intensive than manual test cases. But this is the nature of the beast. It will happen with every tool. If a screen changes, if a system changes, then you have to adapt your script for manual testing. For a manual script, you just adapt a Word document or an Excel sheet or the like. But if the process flow changes, you have new windows, new options, then you have to adjust your script for each and every provider that you're selecting. The maintenance of scripts is something that I always discuss with my end users and should never be underestimated.

We are not using the Capture 2.0 feature at the moment. We are planning to use it in the future. But at the moment, due to the heavy workload on our plate, we haven't had the chance to look into and to roll it out. We are familiar with the concept of Capture and it's a very nice feature because it makes the collaboration between business and IT much easier, and business can be involved in test-automation topics and activities as well.

We have three roles in our environment. We have the key players, who are the project managers, the persons responsible for test automation overall in the respective teams.
Then we have the test automation engineers who are responsible for creating test scripts and to maintain them; sometimes they run them as well. And finally, we have the executors, the ones who are running the scripts, checking the details and, if something is not working fine, going back to the test-automation engineers and asking for support and help.

I rate Worksoft Certify at nine out of ten. I'm happy with the tool, I'm happy with our colleagues at Worksoft. We have a very good relationship, we can bring up everything. There isn't much I can complain about. I'm happy at the moment with Worksoft.

We are in the retail business, so our primary use case is automated regression testing on our supply chain. It helps us oversee our internal economy, including the warehouse, HR, and the stores. 

We prefer Worksoft over other platforms because it's a low-code solution

We can't get the process intelligence module to work properly. We can't get the impact comment that analyzes the incoming development code to run, either. We've also had bugs in the CTM and execution manager in the past year. It took technical support a long time to resolve this issue. We escalated it so that the vice president of the company was included as well. 

I have used Certify for a few years, but the company has been working with it for five years. 

I rate Worksoft support five out of 10. They have some general issues that they're they're not testing, but when we open a ticket, they give us a hot-patch fix. It seems like they're not testing their products enough. On the other hand, Worksoft support has been responsive to our requests. They've addressed the whole list of issues, so we have no more open tickets. Once they escalate something, they're efficient. 

Neutral

The vendor installed it for us, but there were still many issues. We've reported over a hundred bugs and defects. In that time, we could run stuff, but sometimes it has been standing still. 

Worksoft is reasonably priced. 

I rate Worksoft Certify six out of 10. Before implementing the solution, you need to think about how you will use it because it has so many modules. You should consider how you will use those and do a proof of concept. Worksoft hyped up the process intelligence and impact modules for two years, and they still aren't working for us. Before you buy it, make sure it works in your environment. In the future, I hope they have a more stable product with more internal testing and quality control. 

Our primary use case for Worksoft Certify is the automation of test cases. Performance-wise Worksoft Certify is very good. 

The most valuable feature of Worksoft Certify is that it has a codeless environment, so you do not have to be a programmer to use it. 

Worksoft Certify supports multiple interfaces and applications like SAP, Web, or Silverlight Java, and Mainframe. It is easily integrated. 

I have used the tool for a long time and much has improved over the years. Many new features have been added and the tool improves on a daily basis. The UI is much better now and it looks much nicer as well. 

Worksoft Certify's tech support's response time could be improved. 

I have been using Worksoft Certify for nine years. I use the product on a daily basis. 

Worksoft Certify is easy to scale. We have somewhere between 60 and 80 people using it at the moment. 

We do have technical support from Worksoft Certify. When we do run into issues, we first see if we can sort them out in-house. If we are not able to, we reach out to them and they look into the issue and sort it out. 

Positive

I previously used Selenium. Comparing these two products, I can say that you need much more IT knowledge to use Selenium. Worksoft Certify is quite easy to debug. 

The initial setup was easy. On a scale of one to five, with one being very complex and five being very easy, I would give the Worksoft Certify deployment process a five. It also does not need very much maintenance at all. 

We deployed Worksoft Certify in-house. The deployment did not take much time at all. It took just a few hours. 

Worksoft Certify is a bit costly. It is a good product so the cost is a bit high. But I'm not sure about how much we pay for it exactly. 

The advice I would give to someone looking to implement Worksoft Certify is this: contact the provider and request what you need to be installed. Once the solution is installed, you can open up the user manuals and start learning it. It is easy to learn and implement a project in Worksoft Certify.

On a scale from one to ten, with one being the worst and ten the best, I would rate this product a ten overall. 

The primary use is developing automation on SAP at a medical device company moving from Micro Focus UFT scripts.

We were able to increase the percentage of automation from between 40% and 50% to 80% within a year.

The most valuable feature is the ability to automate quickly and to maintain and update scripts.

We would like this to be able to be used outside of SAP applications, as it would be good for other types of products.

I have been using Worksoft Certify for three years.

We expanded licenses after a year.

Prior to this product, we used Micro Focus UFT.

We evaluated an SAP escalator from SAP in UFT.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this product is to get consulting and on-site training.

The reporting is good.

It is very user-friendly.

Certify integrates with other tools and it works very well with other machine testing applications.

If we can import process from other automation tools like UiPath, Selenium, or Automation Anywhere, then it would be more helpful.

I have been using Worksoft Certify for more than seven years.

This is a stable product and we used it on a daily basis.

This is a scalable solution.

We have created tickets in the past and the support is absolutely fine. Their responses are very fast.

We did not regularly use a similar solution prior to Worksoft Certify, although I have worked with others here and there.

The installation is simple, taking less than an hour to complete.

Our internal IT team performed the installation and there is no maintenance required.

I have been comparing other tools, such as Micro Focus UFT One, to see whether they are feasible for our purpose.

Overall, this is a very good tool and I recommend it.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

The reporting feature is something we look forward to. Also, the Worksoft training that we have done was mainly on the web application along with SAP, SNOW, and Silverlight integrations with the tool. It works efficiently with any tool. The projects we mainly used were for the testing of SAP applications over the web. 

Automating the User Acceptance Testing (UAT) process is the most valuable feature of this tool which helps us save loads of time for our clients on the projects and also generating testing and other reports.

We are doing Worksoft Online Training and also take up various Worksoft automation testing projects. I have totally trained about 50 participants on this tool. Most of the trainees are happy to learn and use this product in their jobs now. We have also done two projects, one for retail sales chain and another for a banking project. Both of the projects were delivered on time and the clients are happy to generate some automated OOB reports and also create their own Receipts. The clients were happy with our timelines and also with the training we offered at the end of the implementation.

Most of the features are good. However, being codeless is the best feature that makes it easy to use for those who have done any coding but understand simple English like commands. Anyone with basic knowledge of using a basic tool can learn and implement the solutions with Worksoft. This is why we have been able to train so many consultants on this tool and they use the same in their jobs currently and keep referring us for more candidates. We recommend using this tool for your automation testing projects.

Pricing is a bit high and we would like to have the availability of a trail environment for beginners and training would be great to have and easier to expand and use by more and more consultants.

The bigger reports needs to be more customized by the tool for better use, also tool also can be further simplified by a better Graphical user interface (GUI) will help us a great deal while taking up projects. 

We look forward for these upgrades so we can enjoy using the tool more and help others learn this tool.

I have been using this for the past three years. It has evolved as a codeless automation tool for testing. We used sed 10.0.1 and are currently using 11. 

We have also used few other tools for our trainings. 

ROI is pretty good so far.

We would like to have a cheaper version for a single user/trail version of the same for our trainings. The cloud based environment should be available free for the trainings for 15 days or so.

We do trainings on a needed basis so we understand the demand of various tools in the market. We strongly believe while Worksoft is a good tool it is losing its potential a bit to other tools in the market. The demand for training has gone down in the last two years.

We are using the on-premise version and testing an eCommerce platform: SAP Hybris. This would take in all of our vaccine orders over the Internet. That is primarily what we are testing it on.

The autotesting piece has allowed us to complete testing more quickly, which helps us with our agile sprint. We are getting our releases out at the end of every four to six weeks, then pushing them out. Thus, we're delivering value in terms of our website being faster. The whole autotesting piece has helped us get there and deliver that. This has saved us time.

We are able to take about 1500 manual test cases, working with the Worksoft resources and system, and clobbered them down to 600 to 700 test cases. Our testing has gone from what would have been a course of six weeks down to a little over a week's worth of testing on the autotesting. This is possibly because our systems aren't all in sync at the moment, and we're still in the process of fine tuning this. When we finish fine tuning them, the testing may even be quicker.

For the tool, its valuable features are:

• The ability to build objects. E.g., if you have 50 test cases, but in those fifty test cases, they all had embedded a place order flow. You could build an object of place order, then all 50 of those test cases could use those steps in that object. This has been a real sharp feature, because you don't have to do those order steps 50 times like we used to do on our manual tests. You now have an object sitting out there where you can just reference the object, if you will. That has been a sharp feature.
• The general Capture tool, where you can walk through and mimic what you think is a test case, and the whole time it's capturing your steps. You can then use that to fine tune it and pull a test case out of it. We have it hooked up with Micro Focus ALM. This is where we have all of our test cases living, and it's sitting in that repository for us.

It is a pretty easy tool to use as far as automated testing tools go.

We went into this with the thought that we wanted to be able to hand this off to a business user, so the business user could develop their own test cases automatically through automation. We are not seeing that. We still have it assigned to an IT professional, someone who is certified in Certify. We constantly have to have that type of person around who can build these test cases for us. At the moment, there is not an automated testing tool out there that will allow a business user to develop their own test cases, and certainly not at the level that we want it to be it. So, this may not have been a realistic goal on our side to expect that one of our business people, who has their real job, could spend a couple hours here and there developing test cases on an automated testing tool, like Worksoft or any other.

It's a software package, and you have to know the software to be good at it. You have to have a certification in the tool to be able to be really good at it.

It would be great if our business testers could develop their own automated test cases. However, we either have to bring them up to a level of certification on the software or go hire somebody to do it. Worksoft, in essence, is the Mercedes-Benz of testing tools. If you want a Mercedes-Benz, you have to pay a bit more money. 

With every release you do, you have to go back and touch your old test cases and bring them up to speed, or develop new test cases. In the beginning, that is a challenge because you have to have someone who is certified in the tool to help you develop these test cases.

It is a little complex for someone who is not in the autotesting space to learn it. Like any software, you don't show up to use Oracle Database on day one and think you know it. You have to learn it, get certified in it, and understand it. This tool is similar in that sense. You have to have someone who knows the tool and knows how to use it. It's not something that your business users are gonna pick up, especially if they have a day job. It will take a long time for them to pick it up without full dedication and going to get certified.

We have had no issues with stability. It's been stable.

We haven't jumped yet to other systems. We are definitely looking into that. There should be no scalability issues.

We came to Worksoft with the hope of doing end-to-end testing. When Worksoft came in, we challenged them for a week to show us that it worked where you jump systems. They literally put people on our site for a week. It was a quick little RFP. We did see it work, so we know it works. We saw it jump back to our CARS system. Literally, we pulled Revitas CARS system up, and it logged into our CARS system, that's a web-based system as well. It started going through the steps that we needed to go through in CARS, then passed the status back to our eCommerce system. So, we know it works for us.

We know that the systems that we have involved will work with the end-to-end testing, but we haven't gone there yet. It's mostly on our side, not the software nor Worksoft. We are just doing other projects right now.

We currently have ten people (tops) using it in our organization. 

The technical support was pretty sharp, friendly, and responsive. There wasn't anything glaringly wrong with them.

We have a guy from Worksoft sitting onsite. If I have a problem, I talk to him first.

Long ago, we used HPE QuickTest Professional (UFT). The reason that we had to get off it, because it was liked by our business people, was when we went to Hybris in 2015, they didn't work together. So, we jumped ship at that point and went back to manual testing.

While we already had manual test cases, we wanted to move to autotesting because we are doing agile sprints. Our sprints were down somewhere between four to six weeks, depending on what is in that particular sprint and various conditions of trying to get that sprint out the door. We are trying to get down consistently to four weeks. Consequently, we had these test cases, which was up at around 1500 before, and also manual. We needed to get them to run in quicker, shorter periods. That's where autotesting came in.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We had manual test cases already in place. Before you even got into the entire tool, you would have to do basically a cleansing of your manual test cases. We worked with Worksoft on an analysis period for about a month upfront, where they run through your test cases and make sure they understand what you're trying to test. Then, they try to map out a way forward as the best way to automate. Therefore, the gear up is the homework you do with them in that month before you even touch the tool.  That is the setup piece. 

The setup for us was wanting to know our test environments and putting together solid test cases. In our case, the account setup with customer emails, names, and addresses with all that testing data that you need. We spent that month getting the tests in good shape and all the prerequisites needed to run our tests lined up. Doing homework ahead of time then makes the autotesting run smoothly.

We are still deploying. We started with what we called a 'pilot'. We gave them around 300 manual test cases, which we got down to 141 test cases as part of our pilot. We ended up reskinning out website, and consequently, we had to go back and touch all 141 test cases. Some of them have now become irrelevant with the reskinning of our site. Therefore, we had to go back and reanalyze all of them, and find the ones which were still relevant, which were 90 to 95 percent of them. Then, we had to touch them up. We are in the process of doing that now, touching up our old test cases and building new ones on top of them. This took us a good six months, but we are starting to run regression tests now, though they are not formally in place.

We hired resources from Worksoft, but we do have our own testing groups. We have also hired some Worksoft certified people. We have been using Wipro for Certify testing and development, but our experience with them is not so good. 

Wipro was our testing vendor for manual test cases before we brought on Certify. My guess is that they did not want to lose our business because they told us that they knew how to work with autotest cases, and they didn't. They told us they knew Worksoft Certify, and they didn't. They were given a second chance and hired some Worksoft certified people, but it was a really big headache.

For deployment, we have two people from Worksoft and five or six Wipro people. The Worksoft people are far more productive, since they know the tool better than anyone, but they are more expensive as well. The Worksoft people are sharp. They notice things in our testing and point things out. Their understanding of test cases is off the charts. They picked up our systems very quickly. Wipro has been a bit more of a drag. It is because they're learning Worksoft Certify and don't really know the tool. We also have one or two business people involved who are not developing test cases, but they're project managing.

We are still building test cases, but we are running the testbed that we have, which is a few hundred test cases. However, we only need one person from Worksoft to maintain this.

What autotesting has helped us do is consolidate our test cases because our company departments were testing in their own individual silos, running their own test cases manually. Now, with autotesting, we have been able to eliminate duplication of test cases across those departmental areas. This has helped us knock down our number of test cases. Our test cases are also running more optimally. Therefore, it has very much helped in that sense, so we were able to eliminate a lot of test cases and get out of manual silos by running on autotesting, which is more efficient.

Autotesting can runs overnight. It can run faster than someone doing it manually. The assumption is the system is not making any errors, but someone who is manually doing all the testing could miss something, get tired, etc. Be human, basically. Consequently, the autotesting eliminates some of those types of errors. Put all that together, and we are able to run autotesting and get our whole testing cycle done along with regression testing for an upcoming release, which is being done on these agile four to six-week sprints.

Overall testing has gone from six weeks down to pushing a button on a Friday. We may come in a couple days later, and the testing is done. At the moment, it takes less than a week for the testing, as opposed to six weeks in the past.

We haven't really seen the cost saving come in yet.

The price is in line with everyone else's in the market. They are not cheaper nor more expensive than anyone else who was in our RFP. 

There is a cost involved to doing it, but once you get over the initial cost, then you'll start reaping the benefits and seeing that testing is getting done more quickly and efficiently. We are still early on with it, but the expectation and what we're seeing is that we will start seeing some savings coming out on the back-end once we have this done. 

We looked into TCS and Cognizant.

There is an initial mountain to climb, where you have to get all your test cases in order and have the data ready. This will make it a much smoother setup when it comes to having Certify people coming in. I recommend hiring Certify people who really know the software. Once you get it humming, this is where you will see everything you are dreaming of, where you start a testbed one day and within a week your whole testbed is running, then you have figured out all the issues and can rerun it again. This is where you start seeing the benefits of autotesting.

We have the Capture tool, but I don't know the version that we have.

We are not doing web UI testing for modern applications, as we have SAP ERP, SAP Hybris, and Revitas CARS.

SAP HANA S/4 HCM, FI, BI, Payroll, SuccessFactors, Fiori, other web HTML interface applications.

Our company automates a lot of functional tests for SAP. The automated tests are included in larger integration tests of SAP transaction, workflows and end-to-end processes. Successful implementation and execution of Worksoft Certify tests has been faster than execution of the tests manually. With other tools, it was hard to get successful technical execution right quickly. Automation is not easy. Worksoft Certify makes it easier yet flexible enough to handle some of the most complex automation tasks. Every time steps are automated, test execution times are reduced and application problems are identified faster. Every time that the automated script runs (many times if developed early enough and applied with each change of the application being tested - in the current environment and leveraged in another environment), the investment of work made to develop the script is realized. The more times that the test is executed, the risk of problems going undiscovered is reduced. Testing time is shortened. Avoiding the tedious tasks of manual testing easily repeatable steps saves money.

Worksoft Certify provides the ability to develop test scripts with a low bar of entry among automation tools. It’s very simple to develop. However, great care must be taken to use the tool as intended, otherwise efficiencies and effort savings will not be realized. Like all automation projects, well-designed automation, with thoughtful planning and application, is necessary or you will unable to get back the return after spending the cost in investing time and effort with the tool.

Worksoft Certify provided outstanding feature support for SAP test automation which is unrivaled by other tools in the market. If implementing and need to automate SAP, first pilot the tool with a representative scenario, and then evaluate that retesting the scenario multiple times will ultimately provide compelling overall value for SAP test automation effort.

Worksoft Certify can better identify web test objects by providing libraries through its Extensibility framework. It has improved with it's latest version through Extensibility Tools support and additional test object attributes. Object identification is a necessary barrier for the technical execution of a test script, aside from the script's needs to verify business rules. Automation engineers must affirmatively answer the question: Is the application automatable?

If Worksoft Certify or any other test automation tool can get object identification down consistently and flexibly so that maintenance of web object identification (and hence the web test script) is easy and done with no execution problems, it will allow more scripts to be developed and applied faster with the human test automation staff resources on hand.

A good part of the technical test automation work is to make the script run and affect script changes when the application under test changes. When done right, the business part of automating the test application functions remains the same - leveraging your test investment.

Certify may not the best solution for your needs, but among the commercial and open source offerings in the automation tools space, it should rank very high. It is also a leader in rapid SAP test automation, and can be used as general all-purpose test automation tool for varied clients like PC, SAP, and especially Web.

Only one or two tools I have experienced could be suitable in place of Worksoft Certify. However those tools also carry their own set of disadvantages.

In terms of stability, Worksoft Certify is a polished and mature commercial offering. We rarely encounter problems with the tool. When we do, Worksoft is very responsive to the issue.

We also find the new features in version 11 of the tool to be innovative. The more friendly and fast UI, greater support for test object Extensibility support, Capture 2.0 functionality and global search are all market-driven features that benefit the bottom-line in creating and maintaining Worksoft Certify automation script assets. The improvements are welcomed and we look forward to even more such improvements to make Certify a top-tier competitor in the automation market.

In terms of scalability, we only have a few licenses. We manage and maintain the underlying database actively to avoid scalability issues. We are confident that Worksoft Certify can scale to fit our automation testing needs as we:

• Scale-up with many more automated tests of varying length
• Scale-out with unattended lights-out execution.

I would give technical support a rating of 8/10, 10 being the highest. Worksoft is very quick to respond and address customer problems identified with Certify.

My organization has been using Certify since 2007. We are committed and very happy with Worksoft. I picked up experience with Worksoft Certify when I joined my organization and leverage my existing automation skills to quickly become effective with the tool. I still use Selenium/Java/Python and was expert-level proficient several market leading enterprise QA automation tools.

The setup was done prior to my joining the organization. The existing work helps make my drop-in experience very smooth. It would be harder from the ground up, since there is a database and application server that needs to be installed and administered, and procedures and policies to define so that development is standardized (establishing naming conventions, specific ways to do things when there are multiple options available, etc.)

We implemented and developed in-house expertise. A vendor team would have accelerated and made adoption smoother.

We get at least a 2x return on investment (time, cost, labor) over manual efforts. When tests repeat execution the ROI can go higher. Tests often repeat when executed annually with planned annual system upgrades and additional time, labor and cost to maintain factored in. Including and reusing the tests in other testing activities such as sanity checks and regression cycles increases the overall ROI and investment value.

Conduct a proof of concept (POC) so that you understand what needs to be invested with Worksoft Certify. You will need to understand what sort of time you need to initially set aside to learn and apply the tool, and how that time can be leveraged to shorten continuing development of Worksoft Certify test scripts (processes) as facility in the tool increases.

• Someone needs to know to administer it.
• Someone needs to know how to develop the tests.
• Someone needs to develop a representative automated test script for a candidate application in your organization.
• That person also needs to execute the scripts and then report results of the scripts.

That script needs to execute several times. Now a comparison needs to be done with the time it takes to execute the multiple test runs against the same time it would take to do the same thing manually. In this way, you can now quantify your savings.

Now apply the need over the instances in your organization and compare that to the pricing and licensing to see how many instances of this effort would give you a return on your investment.

You will find that you will have many instances that would justify the price and licensing costs.

We evaluated QTP and Selenium. Worksoft Certify was chosen because of:

• The comprehensive coverage
• Extensive support with SAP
• Additional web test automation support
• Ability to develop tests fast and execute them reliably
• Technical support of the tool

The combination of all narrowed down our choice to Worksoft Certify. It was a great choice in 2007, and if evaluated today instead of 2007, it still would have to be Worksoft Certify since the importance of SAP support is priority and is significant over any of the other criteria and support provided by the other competitors.

Perform a pilot. Apply it to your app under a test with representative workflow. Understand the process of developing Worksoft Certify tests by doing it. Execute the develop tests multiple times. Can you live with developing the tests for Worksoft Certify? Is there value in the execution over multiple times quickly? Can you justify this effort over the cost of your current practices? If you can, then this incremental step can be leveraged and then take you further into more automation successes and favorable outcomes with Worksoft Certify.

Our organization usually tests on beta and production releases of Worksoft Certify so we are privileged to be able to work with the tool ahead of the general market. In that, we experience more issues that would not get out to production releases. Also even after release we work closely with Worksoft Certify support to identify and resolve Worksoft Certify functionality and may receive such priority support than a normal Worksoft Certify client would experience since we have such intimate technical knowledge, experience and relationship with Worksoft and the Worksoft Certify automation tool.

Because we are an active participant in a robust enterprise commercial process to help improve the stability of Worksoft Certify (staged releases to select customers to improve quality prior to some production release), I would say we’re contributing towards a good job of keeping up the stability of the automation tool by testing it first hand in our complex situation and environments and responding back with realistic and practical feedback encountered. We accomplish our organization's mission to develop and run diverse, varied and large amounts of Worksoft Certify processes automation and also assist Worksoft mission to develop and improve the Worksoft Certify automation software.

When speaking on stability, I refer to the stability of the Worksoft Certify software tool. Execution stability of the developed test scripts (Worksoft Certify processes) is a whole separate concern. Even so, Worksoft Certify also shines here in comparison with other tools. To really address this properly and clearly, you need to automate a small test scenario in an application that is to be tested and compare the tool script execution with another tool to see that Worksoft Certify achieves a high-level of repeatability and resiliency in script execution.

Even so, we do work with an occasional problem that comes out in production releases and experienced that the interaction and speed to which the problems are addressed and resolved by Worksoft Technical Support to be extremely satisfactory. I am not sure if this is representative of all of Worksoft’s clients, but we are very happy with their speed and service with which they handle our issues. This contrasts with the unsatisfactory paid subscription support experienced with commercial HP QTP/UFT and IBM Rational tools, and the lack of any support (other than searching the internet and relying on the user and development community) for open-source tools like Selenium and JMeter.

Without the interactive and engaging support, some of these problems would be extremely difficult to solve on our own. However Worksoft solutions were technical in nature beyond what a normal client user could identify and resolve on their own. Using the available and comprehensive technical support and educational services increases the likelihood of success and a positive outcome and benefit with Worksoft Certify. Successes with Worksoft Certify will come from meaningful collaboration to address automation issues rather than handling problems through independent or isolated effort (e.g. the problem could have been addressed with another customer and the resolution could have been worked out already. Worksoft support would be in the best position to know the possibility that a solution exists). 

This is typical of automation tools and the experience of other tools in the automation tool trade. The knowledge and experience is specific to the tools. As such, going to the source who has the most experience is the recommended strategy.