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ServiceNow is a Platform as a Service (PaaS), offering a selection of digital workflows for IT, Project Management Office, HR, finance and more. The platform was developed by an American company ServiceNow in 2004. Throughout years, the core and essence of the technology has remained the same, but the functionality and solutions on offer have expanded and improved.

This article will give you a snapshot of what things look like in Q2, 2019.

ServiceNow value proposition

With the vision “We make the world of work, work better for people”, ServiceNow digitizes manual workflows. Thus you’re able to unlock the real productivity and cover for the main areas of the general business landscape.

ServiceNow Platform is a scalable cloud that offers a range of applications, workflows and processes. Sharing common architecture and data, the platform incorporates a variety of ready-made suites catering for specific business areas:

IT Service Management (ITSM)
HR Service Delivery (HRSD)
IT Operations Management (ITOM)
Customer Service Management (CSM)
IT Business Management (ITBM)
And build their own, custom applications to support business needs.

The foundation – ServiceNow ITSM

ITSM has been the staple of the ServiceNow Platform from the very beginning. The company’s been driving ITSM sphere, taking the lead position in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for the past 5 years! (Get the full Gartner’s report here). In 2018 ServiceNow was marked as High-Productivity Application Platform as a service, which cemented the company’s success as a platform provider.

The company founder – Fred Luddy, initially started with a much broader vision:

As a natural effect, ServiceNow expands the platform functionality by the next business areas, outside of IT.

ServiceNow journey & features

Customers can start their ServiceNow journey from many points. Regardless of where they first start, they have the ability to follow a flexible road-map to bring continued success within the organization. Using ServiceNow, an organization can:

Implement,
Extend,
Expand.

This approach allows organizations to make the most and best value from the investment they have made implementing ServiceNow.

Let’s review a selection of the main areas available in the recent releases.

Service Portal

An organization can provide services and applications to users via a sleek, modern, and intuitive self-service experience. The technology used in the Service Portal is meant to resemble the look and feel similar to the platforms users, people, engage with outside of work.

Native Mobile Apps

Using ServiceNow means organizations are able to build native mobile apps, allowing users to consume products and services on any device. By taking advantage of Maps, Calendars, Lists, Forms, the applications provide a fantastic user experience. Offline mode enables users to even carry on working whenever they’re offline.

Flow Designer

Create workflows, simply with natural language. The flow designer is ideal for process analysts and less technical members of an organization to effectively produce useful workflows to drive processes. Technical members of the team can also develop reusable elements to be leveraged by colleagues in other departments.

Integration Hub

This integration solution offers a way for people to connect with other systems at certain steps of a process. As with the flow designer, certain elements can be easily leveraged by non-technical resources, while coding wizards are able to set up a complete range of integration possibilities.

Performance Analytics

Take control of service delivery by gaining full visibility into the measures and metrics of the processes that drive them. Performance Analytics is perfect for looking to prioritize resources, improve resolution times, and deliver even better self-service by discovering automation opportunities.

Agent Intelligence

Support agent delivery services with supervised machine learning. Using Agent Intelligence you can efficiently assign and prioritize tickets and tasks with learnings taken directly from your own data.

Virtual Agent

Take chat from conversation to resolution. Virtual Agent includes an automated conversational Agent to respond to users’ questions in real-time. Virtual Agent works as standard with Microsoft Teams, Slack, and both Android and iOS operating systems.

The Virtual Agent incorporates a simple but powerful no-code drag and drop designer, great for building quick conversation examples. There are also many pre-built conversations for ITSM, CSM & HRSD.

Time to Value a key focus of ServiceNow

As alluded to a couple of times already, the ServiceNow Platform is configured to maximize the time to value for Businesses. The approach of No Code / Low Code / Pro Code, which allows a full range of people to deliver solutions on the platform means businesses are able to roll-out applications and solutions quickly to align to changing needs. The longer-term strategic growth plans can be managed with more complex solutions prepared with the assistance of professional ServiceNow partners.

Bringing all these items together helps us understand the economic impact of ServiceNow use. In 2017 the neutral advisory firm, Forrester, produced a report showing the ‘Total Economic Impact’ of the platform. The figures included (see the full report here):

195%
ROI for new customers, with a payback period of only 9 months,
30%
Increase in dev resources via low code tools,
290%
Accelerated development efforts,
57%
Increase in employee productivity.

ServiceNow recently published information about the upcoming Madrid release, which will be available in H1 2019. SPOC cooperates with ServiceNow during the pre-release testing which provides a fantastic opportunity to both see the features and put them to work.

SPOC’s Quality Assurance (QA) lead, Zherald Ametlli, was keen to see the changes to the Automated Testing Framework and he has provided his thoughts below.

Madrid Release – ATF

Over recent years, ServiceNow has evolved very fast. The expansion has brought more customers who are using the ServiceNow Platform across multiple business processes.

The greater usage, together with frequent upgrading and patching, means the need for Automated Testing is growing.

One of the main concerns in every company who is managing test cases is having the time and resources to complete the testing process in an efficient way. That’s no different when testing the platform applications and functionality.

SPOC’s primary interest when completing testing is maintaining the highest quality possible. SPOC’s QA team uses different methods of testing to maintain the quality, according to the standards on a particular project. In most cases, manual testing is completed by the testing team. A growing need for regression testing, after every upgrade or patch, has taken our attention to automated testing.

Based on our experience, manual testing consumes around 40% of the resources and time spent after every upgrade. Writing test scenarios, retesting the solution, working on bug fixes, performing regression testing is very time consuming.

There is an obvious need for automation and thanks to the Automated Testing Framework (ATF) and its features, we are able to perform automated testing easily.

With each recent ServiceNow release, the changes and features of ATF have improved. Currently ATF is able to automate most base scenarios. The solution is free, as no additional licenses are required. Using the ATF, you might cover up to 60 % of your test cases.

Madrid vs. London release

In terms of ATF, London release included:

Testing the Application Navigator,
Testing Service Catalog in Service Portal (UI),
Testing Forms in Service Portal.

These features were very helpful and offered a great approach to the Service Portal testing. In Madrid, there are some new standout features, you can find a brief summary of these below.

Copy test case

This option is very useful when you would like to create a test case and reuse it as a sample or template for another. Perfect if you would like to copy and reuse some, or all of the steps in a test case. The UI action called “Copy Test” provides exactly this function.

Parametrized testing

Now it’s possible to run the same test case multiple times using different data as input parameters. A user can create different parameters to store test data for every test running. In addition, you can easily import data prepared in an excel template and use this according to your scenario.

Example: You create a test case for the Change Management module, where the values for ‘Assign to’ and ‘Assigned to’ groups will be driven by the parametrized fields. There would normally be two separate datasets to test for different groups and users. In this case, you can create one test case and import these data sets to run against the fields. You don’t need to copy or re-create the test case again.

Parametrized Testing with ATF ServiceNow Madrid Release Parametrized testing works with test suites and scheduling too.

Custom UI testing

In my opinion, this feature is the one that was so badly missing. It would have been great if custom UI testing was included in ATF from the beginning…. Why?

Testing different HTML elements in a page is a must. Especially for the service portal but also ITSM processes where you have many additional menus, links and custom pages to test. You must test UI pages and now in Madrid it is possible to do this automatically.

First, you need to scan for the components in the page and then select the right one.

This helps to choose the right element in the page and to continue further with testing. Good examples are the buttons in a UI Page or links in KB.

Page inspector

Helps us to inspect the page and find the right HTML element to be tested. It can be activated from the Developer menu and works in real-time.

Therefore, whenever you open any page and select the icon ‘Inspector’ it will automatically highlight the element you selected, giving you more detailed info about it. There are some limitations. Not every element is accessible and selectable. That said, it’s a good tool to start testing and you should try to utilize it as much as possible.

ATF in ServiceNow Madrid release – summary

I’ve listed some of the main features added to the Madrid release. In my personal opinion, the features are very useful. For real environments, it takes time to set up test cases but you can then run them with a click of a button. The next new features to come in the New York release of ServiceNow, in O3 2019.

Tag: itsm

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