This video is an overview of the Automated Test Framework, or ATF.
You can skip to these topics from the YouTube description for this video.
The Automated Test Framework gives you the tools to create and run reusable automated tests on
your ServiceNow non-production instance. You can test both base system and custom applications.
Let’s start by looking at the benefits of ATF over other test methods.
First, you can replace time-consuming and error-prone manual testing.
Since the tests are automated, they’re performed exactly the same way, every time you run them.
Second, you set up the tests once, and re-run them every time you upgrade or modify your instance.
For example, developers can run tests during software development to build robust applications,
and quality engineers can test after upgrading to ensure that the instance
still works as designed. Third, you can create reusable
test templates that let you add predefined lists of steps to existing test plans.
Fourth, you can reduce test design time by copying and modifying quick-start tests.
We’ll take a closer look at these later. Now let’s look at the features of ATF.
Automated test suites allow you to build groups of related tests
into suites, and run them with one action. Remember the benefit of using ATF to perform tests
exactly the same way, every time you run them? What if you need different test data for the
same test; for example, a test to create incidents with low and high priorities?
The parametrized tests feature lets you create parameters to
store test data for each test run. Then you can run a test multiple times with
different test data for each run. Using parallel test execution,
designers can create, run and repair tests in parallel to reduce testing design time.
Designers can also use the Mutually Exclusive Tests feature to identify
tests that should be run separately rather than in parallel with other tests.
In this example Test 2 was started after Test 1, so it takes the free thread. Test 3 was requested
while both Tests 1 and 2 were running, so it starts on the first available thread.
Full-stack testing lets you test both server and standard web client functionality.
Test data rollback automatically rolls back test data and changes to your instance after each test
run. This keeps your test instances clean. But keep in mind that you should never run ATF
tests, or any other functional testing tools, in your production instance.
Why not? Here are some examples of the side effects that could occur.
A test can impersonate users with extensive security access, or change data that may be
designed to trigger actionable events, … …like sending an email to the entire
customer base. Also, the data changes
that a test makes are visible to users on the system before they’re rolled back.
For example, P1 incidents could suddenly appear on charts and just as suddenly disappear,
alarming all your itil users. And the audit history generated by running these tests will
stick around even though the data doesn’t. So, remember to run ATF, as well as any other
functional testing tools, only in a non-production instance.
Now let’s take a quick look at quick-start tests. These ready-to-use tests are built
by ServiceNow developer teams, and are available in the base system.
You can leverage them by copying and customizing them to meet your specific needs.
Available since the Madrid release, the number
of quick start tests increases with each subsequent release.
To see what tests are available for your release,
navigate to the list of available quick start-tests in the product documentation.
Watch these videos to learn more about quick-start tests.
So what kind of test steps can you use? You can run different types of steps based on what you
want to test. Let’s look at a few examples. Test steps are grouped into categories.
When we add a test step to a new or existing test, we can filter the test
step categories in the left panel to make it easier to find relevant test steps.
The Email category, for example, includes steps for testing email functionality.
The Service Catalog category includes test steps specific to the Service Catalog platform.
Tests may contain test steps from more than one category. For example, suppose you need a
test to impersonate a user, open a new form, set field values, and submit the form.
The Server category contains the Impersonate test step, …
…and the Form category contains the remaining steps.
Note that you can also use the search field to find individual tests.
Before you can get started with ATF,
you need to assign roles to users to enable specific permissions.
See the full list of permissions for each role in the product documentation.
In the next video in our series, we’ll show you how to get started with setting up,
running, and scheduling ATF tests.
For more information, see our product documentation, knowledge base, or podcast.
Or ask a question in the ServiceNow Community.