UAT AUTOMATION IMPROVES COVERAGE WITH AUDITABLE RESULTS  | Stand8

There’s never enough time in the day to get your to-do list done. Even when it’s already full, more and more things pop up.  

 One energy company knew this struggle all too well regarding its HRIS systems. 

The company, which provides utilities to 35M+ customers, needed to migrate their system for 20k employees. The vendor providing their HR system was migrating to a new cloud platform. While this move was needed, the scale and the time allowed made this project especially difficult. Essentially, the company needed to migrate its system, or it would lose its HR, Payroll, and Benefits functions.  

To add to the challenge, the client had to run 400 User Acceptance Test (UAT) cases in a short amount of time. 

Did I mention the HR and IT teams responsible for the migration already had full workloads? Despite that, they got to work. 

The company’s existing HR systems were limited to manual tests, butt hey quickly realized these tests were too slow. They would not be able to finish UAT testing by the deadline and migrate their system. The client turned to STAND 8 for a solution. 

Our automation team stepped in to assess the situation and fully automate the UAT process. 

With the over 400 test cases feeling insurmountable, our team of 6 engineers knew there was only one solution — automation.  

First, let’s unpack UAT or User Acceptance Testing.  

User Acceptance Testing is the process by which companies and end users assess if products support real-world business and user scenarios before they launch the software. It takes place after Unit, Integration, and System testing.  

Organizations need UAT because development teams build software based on technical requirements and it is very hard to account for all scenarios that users will face when the development team is removed from that actual context of use. 

Put simply, just because software passes technical requirements, that does not mean it will pass users' requirements. 

The goal of UAT is to account for as many scenarios as reasonably possible with test cases, run tests against those test cases, find problems, and fix them BEFORE the software goes live. 

Naturally, this creates an enormous number of scenarios — test cases. To handle this volume of test cases UAT Automation uses scripted tests that run in automated testing tools like Selenium, Appium, and Postman. 

UAT automation is quickly gaining traction and has clear benefits. 

With an automated test, you get simple “yes” or “no” results that are highly accurate, less prone to errors, and most importantly – FAST. 

Stand 8’s 6-member team spent 4 months putting together the automation framework to evaluate all business outcomes. 

STAND 8 chose a straightforward outcome format of “Given When Then”.   

Given

This simple format is one of the foundational tenets of Behavior DrivenDevelopment. It allows the testing team to generate simple results and MOW DOWN UAT TEST CASES. 

Then STAND 8 Automation ran the UAT tests, and the results were even better than the client had hoped for. 

The client identified 400 test cases that they needed to cover. Using a data-driven approach, we identified all possible permutations and several varying salary and benefits rules that resulted in over 12,800 test cases. That was 34x the test cases they were initially evaluating. 

The team automated all tests in a period of six months and executed them in less than one month. With 86% test coverage, the executive team had high confidence that no payroll processing would encounter errors and existing employee benefits would remain intact ​. 

Because the UAT Automation Framework that STAND 8 used was so efficient and robust, there were very few errors in payroll processing and existing benefits processes were unaffected; all before the deadline for migration. 

To learn more about this solution and how STAND 8’s Automation Testing Services can help your team reach out to us at Solutions@STAND8.io.