An Overview Of Conducting ServiceNow Testing

As technology keeps evolving, organizations need to realign their business strategies. It is always good to improve the overall efficiency and end-user experience to stay ahead of the competition. Automated tasks and creating customized workflows add tremendous value. This is the primary goal of the ServiceNow platform.

ServiceNow is a cloud-based workflow automation platform that allows enterprise organizations around the globe to improvise their existing operational efficiencies by streamlining and automating work-related tasks. However, these tasks require a lot of manual intervention, and that is why it is essential to perform automation to deliver quality outputs in the long run.

As per the enlyft research, more than 20,000 companies use ServiceNow as their trusted partner. Some of these prominent companies are in the United States and the computer software domain. ServiceNow accounts for 7.27% of the market share in IT management software (i.e.), it stands in the top 4 brands that provide customized software solutions to leading brands worldwide.

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Looking at the ServiceNow customers by industry trends, the Computer Software, and Information technology and services account for a major share of 20% and 14%.

The dynamics of a business change over time. In order to meet market needs, ServiceNow instances must be upgraded regularly. Therefore, it is imperative to perform ServiceNow testing whenever a change is made to an application, no matter how minor, since this may affect existing functionality.

In this article on ServiceNow testing, we explore what ServiceNow testing is, its importance, key aspects, and how to test your ServiceNow applications.

More about ServiceNow Platform

ServiceNow was founded in 2004 by developer Fred Luddy. During its early years, ServiceNow started as an ITSM (Information Technology Service Management) solution to make an impact. But surprisingly, it gained an early adoption from the IT ecosystem, especially the professionals.

Due to its elegant and easy-to-understand platform design capabilities, it has increasingly made its presence felt in other service and business units across different industries.

ServiceNow works on three core principles that have guided the evolution of its business solutions.

• Modernize: It is focused on modernizing the customer needs and requirements by providing customized user experiences. This is done to stay ahead when it comes to technology and market trends.
• Transform: ServiceNow helps companies to achieve much-needed digital transformation with IT operations management, governance, risk, business management, and so on. More and more companies have realized the importance of digital transformation to achieve next-level growth prospects.
• Innovate: ServiceNow provides automated, user-friendly solutions and the much-needed innovation that the business is looking for.

ServiceNow allows you to:

• Transform the IT value chain and operations.
• Drive innovation on a single cloud platform.
• Help to achieve faster business growth.
• Align teams and stakeholders to collaborate and deliver exceptional outcomes.

ServiceNow leads the way when it comes to the global IT Service Management applications market share. As per the report, last year, it accounted for a 39.6% market share with a 22.4% rise in ITSM license, maintenance, and subscription revenues.

Need for ServiceNow Testing

ServiceNow is a cloud-based platform that helps to manage your day-to-day operations. ServiceNow testing is performed on supported ServiceNow applications to ensure that the product is free from any defects and the system functionalities are working as per the finalized requirements.

ServiceNow testing is done by both the development as well as testing teams. The development teams ensure that the code requirements are validated before being pushed to the production environment. The testing team performs manual and automation tests to validate the product requirements.

If the ServiceNow testing is not performed thoroughly, it could harm the business revenue and customer growth. Therefore, it becomes crucial that the testing teams provide a go-ahead so that the features are effectively supported on the ServiceNow platform.

When there are frequent updates from ServiceNow, you need to perform ServiceNow testing to ensure that ServiceNow’s update did not affect any business-critical processes.

Key aspects to remember in the case of ServiceNow Testing

There are a lot of critical aspects that you should be aware of when you are testing your ServiceNow applications. There is manual and automation testing that can be performed on the ServiceNow applications.

These are the supported testing types that can be performed:

• Unit testing
• System testing
• User Acceptance Testing

Here are some of the aspects that you should focus on:

• First, identify a list of features or functionalities and workflows you need to test. Next, decide which feature or functionality has the maximum business impact, and this is where you can have an initial approach to get started.
• Identify levels of testing and goals. Decide if you need to test individual components or configurations and what applications will need testing an entire workflow.
• Assign roles and tasks to your team members: This means that every team member should be aware of their responsibilities for testing.
• Communicate the testing schedule to all the relevant stakeholders well in advance to avoid any last-minute surprises.

Challenges involved in ServiceNow Testing

ServiceNow, on average, releases new updates twice a year, with bug fixes and functional and performance upgrades. Whenever there is an update, it is challenging to ensure that businesses mitigate any possible risk. In addition, it becomes challenging to test out the new features to ensure that backward compatibility is not broken.

During automation testing, it is challenging for the testing team to learn how to write automation test scripts if they do not have sound technical and programming knowledge. This can become more challenging if you have new resources and are not aware of the overall system functionalities and workflows.

Sometimes, the ServiceNow testing resources do not have the required knowledge to understand the overall functionality flow. This could be a blocker while the testing is being performed.

Many challenges arise when performing comprehensive testing on the ServiceNow platform and its supported applications, but this is how companies grow and evolve. If not improvising the testing strategies and frameworks, you will have a tough time surviving in this competitive marketplace.

Let us continue reading this blog on ServiceNow testing and understand how we can tackle market challenges to come out on top.

Handling the challenges of ServiceNow Testing

It is practically not possible for organizations to allocate separate infrastructure or resources when you are testing massive applications that are part of the ServiceNow platform. This is where you need a reliable testing platform to help you overcome day-to-day testing challenges. Organizations can rely on LambdaTest – a cross browser testing platform that provides browser and app testing on an online browser farm of 3000+ real browsers and operating systems online.

LambdaTest has a long-term mission to provide the most powerful, comprehensive, and secure cloud testing platform so that software developers and testers can perform testing intelligently. They have come a long way in simplifying the testing requirements, but some other value-added features are planned for future releases. They have customers from Fortune 500 and G2000 companies, and all they care about is providing the next-level user experiences.

You can perform the below testing options based on the requirement:

• Manual Testing
• Automation Testing ( Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, and Puppeteer)

Playwright is an open-source, cross-browser automation framework that provides e2e testing without the need for any third-party tools. Learn what it is, how to install it, and how we can execute tests using Playwright.

• Real Device Cloud Testing
• Mobile App Testing

There are many other testing options available on the platform that can be taken up when required. For example, organizations can utilize cloud-based testing capabilities to ensure that the testing is working perfectly on multiple browsers and operating systems simultaneously.

Here are some of the top features offered by the LambdaTest platform:

1. Integrate your favorite tools with LambdaTest, which avoids manually tracking bugs and tasks.
2. Perform live online interactive testing on web and mobile apps using different supported environments.
3. Selenium testing across a wide range of desktop and mobile browsers.

Components of ServiceNow Testing

With ServiceNow, you can quickly start automation for any service management-related case scenario. Different components constitute a ServiceNow platform.

• ServiceNow ITSM – Developing quality IT services
  IT Service Management (ITSM) helps provide high-quality IT services to the end customers. It means that you focus on providing a great user experience, continuous improvements, delivering intelligent automation solutions, and being successful in providing top-notch performance standards.
• Common Service Data Model (CSDM)
  It is a framework followed for CMDB data modeling and data management. It helps you understand the basics of Service Modeling and the common standards around it. In addition, this component forms an integral part of service configurations.
• Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC)
  It allows you to evaluate the risk and compliance factors that impact your business. As a result, you can make more informed decisions and improve the performance standards across organizations. This means that the risks and issues are identified in the beginning so that you can transform your risk strategies going forward.
• SecOps
  This component is all about different security tools like firewalls etc., that help evaluate security incidents.
• ITBM – Manage IT requirements seamlessly
  ServiceNow ITBM allows you to manage the processes, people, and projects which means that you can effectively manage the entire IT ecosystem and maximize its actual value. In addition, this means that you can align your business goals and objectives to the required outcomes, which is excellent in the long run.
• DevOps
  With ServiceNow DevOps, the development and operation teams can achieve the agile goals while maintaining the code quality. DevOps platform ensures that the software is delivered timely, keeping in mind the quality aspects as well.
• ITOM – IT Operations management
  ServiceNow ITOM is all about effectively managing your IT operations. IT teams can generally be working manually when they collect data from different monitoring tools that impact the system’s overall infrastructure health. To tackle the cloud challenges, improvise, and improve how they operate.

  Apart from the above components, IT asset management, risk management, and change management components make ServiceNow a complete end-to-end solution for handling complex business requirements.

Why test the ServiceNow Components?

Different businesses rely on the ServiceNow platform for their business needs. These components are bundled together to provide different service offerings. They need to be integrated with third-party applications. This is where the testing of ServiceNow components is required.

Testing of ServiceNow components ensures:

• Different components work in collaboration to accomplish the desired business requirements.
• The functionality related to each component is validated and verified.
• The third-party integrations and plugins that are supported can also be verified.

How to test ServiceNow and its applications?

Software testing is a structured process followed by big organizations and startups. The testing is performed in the software development phase as well. This is part of the SDLC phase, where the developers and testers work in close collaboration to ensure that the functionality is working as per the defined system requirements.

The ServiceNow testing is done to ensure the functionalities of ServiceNow applications are working as expected.

Two types of testing can be performed on ServiceNow applications:

• Manual Testing
• Automation Testing

Manual Testing

Manual testing is all about testing the application manually. This is performed keeping in mind the end-user goals and objectives. This testing is performed by a manual testing professional that creates different test cases from the system requirements and then runs those test cases manually.

The required functionality to be tested is validated against the written test cases. No prior programming language is required for a manual tester, but familiarity with the product or application matters.

If you are looking to test ServiceNow and its related applications manually, you can use the capabilities offered by the LambdaTest platform. For example, real-time browser testing by LambdaTest is a great feature that can help you test your web applications. You can sign up on LambdaTest and explore the different features on their platform.

Follow the below steps to perform live-interactive ServiceNow testing on LambdaTest.

1. Login to your LambdaTest, and it will redirect you to the user Dashboard.
2. Select Real Time Testing from the left sidebar.



3. Select the Desktop or Mobile option, enter the test URL, and select the browser, VERSION, OS, and RESOLUTION. Once you are selected all the required options, click START.



Once you click START, it will route you to the cloud-based real OS, where you can perform ServiceNow testing of your applications.

Here is a quick video tutorial on real-time testing to help you get started with ServiceNow Testing.

Subscribe to LambdaTest YouTube Channel for the latest tutorials on automated browser testing, Cypress UI testing, CI/CD, and more.

Automation Testing

Automation testing is an entirely different proposition compared to the manual approach. The software testing professional tests the functionality using an automation testing tool. Based on your testing requirements, automation tools can be Selenium, QTP, RFT, etc.

Automation testing is all about performing and writing automated scripts, which saves a lot of manual effort and time. Therefore, the software testing professional should have a sound programming language when automation testing needs to be performed.

ServiceNow Instance also has an existing test framework in place. This includes the Test Management and ServiceNow Automated Test Framework (ATF). You can utilize these applications to perform automation testing as well.

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We discussed how to perform manual testing on multiple browsers and devices, but the market and technology trends slowly shift towards automation. As a result, you will see features related to Automation Testing, Selenium Testing, On-Premise Selenium Grid, and Automation Testing cloud on the LambdaTest platform.

Below is the screenshot of the Automation testing performed on the LambdaTest platform. You can either migrate your changes from SauceLabs, BrowserStack or HeadSpin. If you do not want to import or migrate your changes, you can choose the desired language or testing framework from the options available on the screen.

Once you select the desired option, you need to set up the project, add OS/Browser configuration, copy code changes, and execute the test cases. You can also view your test results to show the exact status.

Summary

In this blog article on ServiceNow testing, we have discussed the introduction to ServiceNow and how ServiceNow is changing the market dynamics of the IT ecosystem by automating system requirements. We also touched on the key aspects to remember in the case of ServiceNow Application Testing, its challenges and how to overcome them, and more.

Suppose you are looking for much-needed digital transformation and improvising on your testing strategies simultaneously. In that case, you can use ServiceNow and LambdaTest’s immense capabilities to achieve your desired business goals and objectives.