hey everyone welcome back to my channel it is so good to have you here in this application showcase we're looking at automate pro a truly vast suite of tools to help you plan develop deploy test document and monitor your servicenow platform now when i say vast i've described six separate processes and really we're only gonna have time to showcase just two of the automate pros tools we are gonna showcase auto test and auto document so we're kind of starting in the middle here uh and here to talk to me about these tools is co-founder and ceo of automate pro mr paul chorley hi robert how are you i'm doing great i hope i didn't butcher the name that's great perfect all right it's good to have you here so paul can you give me like a three minute genesis of what automate pro is sure robert delighted to so around six years ago i became aware of the servicenow platform and that was during a consultancy contract in central london from the moment i saw it absolutely loved it as lots of people do and i recommended it to my client we implemented it as their core it and customer service management platform but what we found was that whilst we were implementing it there were a couple of missing bits if you like um we saw that there was a missing automated testing tool that was focused at non-technical people and also there was nothing in the platform to help us produce system and user documentation user guides process documents that kind of thing so my business partner and i we stood in front of a blank whiteboard and we sketched out a blueprint for what has now become automate pro i think i've still got the photos somewhere but what's interesting looking back at that blueprint is that what we actually defined was a way of capturing a user's interaction with servicenow or any web-based system for that matter and we do that in a structured and kind of non-technical way for example we use actions and checks so i click on a button and i expect this this and this to happen what we realized is that this definition can then be reused throughout the whole software development life cycle without having to rewrite it at every stage for example traditionally a business analyst would open up jira or the safe module and start writing a user story a developer would then write his own technical spec around that maybe in a word document or something a tester then opens up a spreadsheet and starts writing test scenarios and steps a process owner writes process document a ba writes user guide etc etc lots of different documents all flying around different interpretations by different people of essentially what is the same scenario and of course as things change those documents get out of step instead of all that what we do in automate pro is that you capture the requirements in the form of a business scenario with expected behavior and really importantly robert these are captured in a kind of database form but also in a human or business readable form a bit like given when then but what you can then do is at a click of a mouse you can create a business requirement spec and this is great for sign off with your customer for example you've got a really clear definition of exactly what your system does and perhaps more importantly what it doesn't do then here's the really clever bit because you've captured the requirements and acceptance criteria in a structured form with another click of your mouse this can be turned into an automated test and pushed through the auto test engine which is secure scalable and robust and we host that for you another click of your mouse there's your test results traceable back to requirements of course and your acceptance criteria a screenshot of every step this is fantastic for cobit iso compliance that kind of thing now the click of your mouse that's turned into a user guide a process document or training guide effectively what we're doing is repurposing the same business scenario in a different form and this is the real power of automate pro robert and today we'll focus on the auto dock and auto tests but as you mentioned there are six modules in the whole platform which gives you power across the whole of the life cycle you really did an excellent job of kind of focusing on those two things we're going to cover today and folks i was really blessed to have a deep dive on the full automate pro app and the amount of power in the the suite of applications is just unbelievable i'm kind of shocked and ashamed that i hadn't heard about it until now so if you want to see more after this demo please give a like and a mention in the comments and tell us what other parts of that process you'd like to see next again that's plan develop deploy test document and monitor on your servicenow platform okay so for this demo we're going to start in the middle okay and that's my favorite part because it deals with automated testing and automated documentation and i'm so excited to have you see this because i was so skeptical of paul when he first came to me and talked about auto documentation so fair warning you're going to have your minds blown so paul give us a couple minute version of what processes we've done on automate pro to get us to automated testing okay and because you have a couple concepts that i feel make testing way more scalable on servicenow yeah so the first thing that we find really helps people with our platform is the ability to get started really quickly with it so within kind of 10 seconds of installing your ultimate pro application on your instance you can have automatically built a test and have run it and we do that with a facility called quickstart ai so this intelligently examines your configuration of servicenow and builds you a test based on your configuration so this isn't a template one against the out of the box configuration this will go away and examine your configuration use this template record on which to base your test scenario you can add a whole host of different verifications to the test and then it will create you a test within about 10 seconds specific to your configuration and that's not just for the itsm modules that can be for bespoke modules that you created for the service portal catalog items whatever you want and you can see here that it's created me two big chunks of stories i can click on this create design document facility and immediately i've got a really comprehensive test that is not only going to go in completely incident form but also do a whole host of checks on that form for mandatory fields read-only visible not visible et cetera et cetera and of course you can amend this really easily but you could see there within 10 seconds i've got myself a test i've started to build that regression test pack out imagine the time you would spend getting something that's this complete in real life so it's like one test and that document would take i mean it would take an hour it would take more than an hour to you know probably an afternoon of a human being doing it and we just saw that done in 10 seconds the other thing i can do here robert is group my test into into themes so i might want to have a collection of tests that are all around change management or incident management maybe the service portal i might want to group tests into sort of groups of smoke tests or full regression packs um ones that are particularly focused on a particular release and so on so themes are really useful because you can group and categorize your tests and this makes running them really fantastically easy and it looks like it looks like you can run multiple themes against a single test epic right exactly that yeah so you could run your change management incident management problem management um but leave your service portal testing for another time for example it's completely up to you and it allows you that flexibility we've automatically generated this test here that was done within 10 seconds i can run it straight away just by creating this test and the really important thing is here i can run this against any environment that i wish to so for example i can configure different versions of servicenow maybe i want to point it at my test environment my staging my pre-production it's as simple as just picking the environment from this list and anyone can configure these so you can have as many of these as you need to and this really helps with our upgrade testing because you can establish a baseline against your current version and then point it at an upgraded version and then compare the results on a on a report side by side right and as we all know our instances aren't always kind of reconciled together so i know my test system isn't going to be exactly like my prod system i try but the fact that i could run it against both and see the results separately winner feature yeah exactly and we've made that really simple with this upgrade report so just give it a name and then you can compare any instance you want so if i want to compare my madrid test to my orlando tests and you can do this down to versions as well so if you've got an overnight security patch or something and you want to check that it hasn't had an impact on on your system you can do that and this is where the themes come in so you can pick which themes you're interested in comparing and then it's as simple as that press a button pick your test generate that this is a really really nice feature for doing your upgrades really speeds things up again created as a knowledge base article and it's going to compare for me side by side these were the results in madrid and this is what i experienced in orlando down here you've got a summary of the defects which ones were high which were critical any new ones that were introduced you can see here that this upgrade actually introduced four new ones in the change management and four in the problem management area and if you go down here then it's telling you exactly what the state of play is with these defects and even the defect number so that you can click on it and open it up and go and examine what's going on have you ever heard the saying that the best technology is invisible visible i.t yes indeed because i think we should just rewind a little bit and let it fully sink in that we just produced an instance to instance test we're reading the results of the test we're not saying here's how you set up a test and do it while we were talking we basically said go and there's the results yeah it's a really great feature and our clients find this the singly most important thing effectively this is like an upgrade risk report and it's not at a technical level this is at a business process level something's gone wrong here i mean clicking on the resolution information tab there's a new defect introduced what what is it i need to go and look at it this opens up the defect again we don't just give a screen dump of code here this is telling you exactly what's gone wrong and attach the screenshot as well so you can open that up have a look at what's gone wrong compare it with the pre defect as well the defect on the other system and it's going to show you what's gone wrong here so this is great for quickly determining what's happened with the upgrade what's impacted and resolving it it's still mind-blowing to me because like i know teams that will spend a week or two testing out a new version and god knows what they're doing with their current development as that two weeks is happening but they get to the end of that two weeks basically testing quote unquote everything we could and then walking out the next day to a whole bunch of risks and stuff they didn't think of to even test right so the output of this alone is worth its weight in gold yeah absolutely and you can run these full regression tests back every night and have one of these reports on your desk in the morning every morning you come in you see what's broken what's still working and of course the team can then go and look at those defects and resolve them there and then and the the defects probably been introduced by something the previous day and it's fresh in everyone's minds typically what happens is two weeks sprint there's some testing done and the defect is found and you know no one can remember two weeks ago what they did to to introduce that defect so really stops that kind of build up of of defect depth during a sprint it solves it there and then all right so i i think one of the paradigms that makes people shy away from going neck deep into testing is the fact that i can define it all once but then you know next week i've pushed a bunch of stuff into production and so now what do i do about all my test plans that weren't testing the thing that i just added there's a phrase used in test automation called test automation rot it's like your your tests are great once you've just built them but then over time they decay and they rot and they get out of date and that's the major stumbling block with a lot of test automation systems so we've overcome that with the concept of model blocks so i'm just going to really quickly show you here how we can use model blocks to not only build tests but also maintain them over time as they change so i want to build a new scenario here to test a say a p1 incident being raised and what i do is i can just pick from my catalog of model blocks these are test blocks if you like and they're reusable and maintainable so let's say i want to log in as a particular type of user let's pick a itil helpdesk person and then i want to go and create a p1 incident let's see pick this one i just drop that into the right hand side here and then maybe i want to go and open that incident that i've just found or just created i drop it in like that click ok and that's drop those into the test for me so really fast and really easy to do and of course these versions of these model blocks are all version controlled that so if i add a field for example onto the incident form or remove a field i just go and change it once in that block and then everywhere where that block is used that test will be amended accordingly so completely removes that problem of test maintenance rot and also of course speeds up the uh the build time for for building out your regression test packs right it just decreases the risk because you would do if you have your change management process the test of the change management process would be composed of various blocks but then comes the day where you actually change your change review process and you might just need to change the change review block versus changing that entire thing and risking the entire thing for the sake of that one component piece yeah absolutely i mean it's it's the biggest problem with test automation is the is the maintenance and keeping on top of that some people say to us that test automation almost becomes the project itself rather than the the development it becomes the project it becomes bigger than the project so we had to solve that and we've solved it with this this concept of model blocks so powerful just one other great feature in the auto test module is our test run report now i know that people produce these and they take a long time to do so we wanted to make this so easy for people uh and so simple click of a button you've got your test results report really importantly on here you've got all of the stuff that everyone wants to see as a quality assurance department which version was this run against what date and time was it run how many stories were executed how many times test steps what passed what failed etc really nice and presentable and of course you've got lovely traceability in here whereby where we've got a failure we've got a link to the defect reference so i can open that up and trace it back to the defect really nice and simply gives you complete auditability of your test execution results so whereas before we saw kind of a side-by-side instance comparison this is the run of the test suite yeah exactly so if you were testing a new piece of functionality or something then this is what you'd uh you'd use to verify and your defect screenshots where it can it highlights exactly what's gone wrong we've even added a red box around the bit that's gone wrong on this so for diagnosis of this it's absolutely awesome and of course you've also got a great feature which is uh the test run viewer so this allows you to actually sort of visualize the test being executed as you go through step by step every step of the process and you can jump to the part where there's a defect you imagine he's even got labels in the bottom of the screenshot yeah labels and you and you can download these you know so if you want to email somebody or something you can do that it's really brilliant for recreating um a defense is it describing the defect too like i see at the very bottom there create p1 incident fails for validation so it's got the whole like it's the information itself dude i don't even i can't even imagine what it would take for somebody to to to do this manually i'm talking like a month of somebody who is you know test engineer focused just yeah absolutely and you know my business partners as the uh the qa background and he said he used to take about 30 to 40 of his time just managing defects you know screenshotting putting red boxes around things highlighting what gone wrong and of course also documenting the sequence of steps he took to get to that bit whereas of course in here the developer can just say okay well i can see exactly what the steps were before the defect because you know i can look at every single screenshot so it speeds up the whole process this is not just about improving the life of the tester it's improving the life of the whole you know team really great feature all right so here's an amazing insight from automate pro that just really blew my mind and just made me want to make this video so badly as you know i'm a documentation fiend i did a couple videos on this so be sure to check the youtube card that should be popping up in this corner right about now and what paul and this team has proved to me and i was a total skeptic on this but what they proved to me is that you can if you can articulate a test you've effectively defined a use case so automated documentation is nearly as easy as transforming your test case for human consumption and this is what we realized robert with the the way we design the system is that that use case is already in the system you've defined it for testing purposes test automation purposes and here's our results so we know that this scenario has passed its testing and works as defined by its requirements and acceptance criteria but we now want to help the user use that process we want to guide them through that so how do we do that we simply click on this button here create user guide and all of our documents in auto dock are produced as knowledge base articles so there's there's no pdf documents they get lost on file shares and things like that you select which knowledge base you can apply style templates colors fonts to make it look exactly as you want it to be you can even repurpose the same test in different sort of ways so you imagine you might want to create a user guide type template a training guide or a process document so even there's reuse even within each particular thing so i'm going to go for a process document and you can see down here that i've customized this to exclude certain screenshots from this and so on change some of the wording click ok and within about three or four seconds you've got a knowledge base article with a step-by-step process guide hyperlinks for tables of contents logo fonts all defined as you want to you can add any additional information you want and this becomes your process repository if you like or you use a guided repository and this is a great but it drops in the screenshots that it's taken during the test uh highlighted each step and that's fantastic i mean we use this ourselves on our product to create our user guides and it saves us literally you know days and days of of work screen shotting highlighting and of course if you change your process you add a field onto a form or you know change your catalog to add a new new field then you've got to run your tests through any way so you run your tests and then click the button and your user guide is automatically updated as a result for those vendors who keep telling me documentation is hard we just saw a single push of a button generate a document with all the screenshots you need for all the use cases that you've built it's it's actually one of the pieces of functionality that really gets people excited robert we we show them the testing we show them the you know the requirements piece we show them all the other pieces and then we press that button on user guides and people go wow you know i've had people go actually say you know wow i didn't know it's going to do that i couldn't believe it's going to do that and we're going to blow your socks off even more robert with a with the next release we're issuing because that's going to also automatically create guided tours for you from tests how awesome is that servicenow guided tours servicenow guided tours wow man i'm glad somebody's finally using those things [Laughter] because they're awesome they're just it's just one of those things just like testing it's like oh man it's gonna take me so much effort to build them out and then they they suffer the same rot principle as the test cases do absolutely and a lot of people don't actually build them because they take too long uh everyone would like them but they take too long yeah and as you see they get out today it's staggering to do the math on how much time is being saved here like it's at least at the scale where people they'll look at a servicenow deployment project and they'll say nah we're not gonna do that test stuff right we'll just live with the consequences because dealing with the consequences is almost less time than building the tests yeah but now it's like push the button receive the tests like as long as you've done all your planning and everything correctly and oh also push the button after your test and get a user guide that's like having somebody build a house for you it's like let's check out the garage and holy cow there's a porsche in it absolutely and and the the organizations that love this of course are the ones that are highly regulated they've got auditors looking over their shoulders all the time and they spend most of the time you know trying to keep auditors happy and showing the evidence and the traceability and this just you know we've had companies come to us and say we just we just showed the auditors your tool and they went yeah move on to the next department and that's what you want when you're being audited yeah no kidding and and super low friction so folks there was so much more i wish i could squeeze into this episode and i can't stress enough for all the value that we've seen you're still only seeing a third of what's available in the automate pro application suite in my 12 year experience this is the most ambitious scale of application that just literally hemorrhages opportunities to re regain time or satisfy compliance needs the automated testing is super easily accessible you don't have to be a servicenow dev to do it and the automated documentation gets my dark horse award for the most unexpectedly awesome thing i've seen all year and folks this is about scale in the testing and documentation world we now have two options race on a tricycle or race in a formula one car or don't do either and we already know there's people out there that aren't doing it but with auto test and auto dock we see this stuff at the push of a button be the person driving the formula one car paul if somebody wanted to learn more how do they get in contact with you yeah thanks robert um of course we've got our website automatepro.com and we've got a super friendly team we pride ourselves on being really friendly and relaxed and of course you could email us if you wanted to on hello at automatepro.com as well um we're really looking forward to talking to people we love showing people what we can do with the power of the tool and um you can do a free trial so you can even get your hands on it to see for yourself the power of it paul thanks so much for reaching out and thanks so much for being on the show today robert you're welcome i've loved it i'm really glad you're excited about the uh the platform as we are it's been a pleasure if you'd like to sponsor this channel's content email me at the address pictured here if you need a conversation on where your servicenow implementation is or where it's going you can reach me on super peers and book a short consult if you want to contribute to high quality high frequency output consider a donation if not i still appreciate your viewership consider hitting the like button and sharing within your network thanks for watching you