Workday, a leader in enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources, relies heavily on its marketing portal to drive sales and engagement. Rohini Shanmugam, a Principal Quality Automation Engineer at Workday, leads the team responsible for ensuring the quality of this critical platform. Facing challenges with outdated testing methods and the complexities of authoring component testing on the Adobe Experience Management platform, Rohini sought a solution that could improve efficiency and test coverage. This is where mabl came in.
Challenge:
Before adopting mabl, Workday relied on a combination of manual testing and Selenium scripts. This approach proved to be time-consuming and inefficient.
- Manual testing: Consumed significant time and resources, limiting the team's ability to thoroughly test new features and releases.
- Selenium scripts: While offering some automation, the scripts were difficult to maintain and adapt to the dynamic nature of the marketing portal, especially with its authoring components.
Ultimately, this combination led to reduced test coverage due to a limited capacity for testing, slower release cycles based on the bottlenecks created by manual testing, and increased costs as more resources were required to address production issues and maintain the existing scripts.
Goals in Using mabl:
Rohini and her team at Workday had clear objectives when evaluating mabl:
- Improve testing efficiency: Automate repetitive tasks and accelerate test creation.
- Increase test coverage: Expand testing across different environments and functionalities, including authoring components.
- Enhance product quality: Reduce production bugs and improve release confidence.
- Free up resources: Enable the team to focus on higher-value activities like exploratory testing and strategic initiatives.
Implementation:
Rohini began with a proof-of-concept (POC) focusing on the challenging authoring component testing. Impressed with mabl's capabilities, she championed its adoption across the team.
Reduced production defects:
- Ease of use: The intuitive interface allowed the team to quickly learn and implement mabl, with Rohini herself mastering the tool in a week.
- Training and adoption: Rohini employed a hands-on approach, encouraging her team to explore mabl through "record and play" sessions, fostering engagement and ownership.
- Gradual rollout: The team started with basic tests and progressively incorporated more complex scenarios, including JavaScript snippets, CSS selectors, and UI validations.
Benefits:
Implementing mabl has yielded significant benefits for Workday's marketing team:
- Increased efficiency: mabl proved to be 2.5x faster than Selenium for test creation, enabling the team to create 246 tests in 4 PIs and save 102 hours.
- Expanded test coverage: The team automated tests for two applications with complex end-to-end scenarios, significantly increasing test coverage.
- Accelerated release cycles: Automated regression suites run at the end of each sprint and BVT suites after each build, enabling faster releases.
- Improved product quality: With increased test coverage and faster feedback loops, 13 issues were identified and resolved early on, preventing costly production bugs.
- Cost savings: mabl has led to approximately $638 in savings per PI and $1,250 per release. In 2023 alone, Workday saved approximately $20,000 by catching bugs before they reached production.
Conclusion:
mabl has empowered Workday's marketing team to transform its testing processes, achieving significant efficiency gains, cost savings, and improved product quality. By embracing intelligent test automation, Workday can ensure its marketing portal remains a powerful engine for growth and customer engagement. Rohini's success story demonstrates the value of mabl in enabling teams to adopt a culture of quality and agility.
