Workday update testing: Your questions answered
New features, improved processes and a better experience are essential to ensure Workday can grow with your business. To ensure Workday is able to keep up with your company’s needs, major updates are grouped into twice-yearly releases, with changes across nearly every aspect of the system.
When changes are introduced to your system, it's crucial to evaluate how they might influence your unique Workday platform, especially when change can potentially impact vital business processes (BPs) and security configurations. Here, we answer some of the most common update testing questions from across Workday Community and beyond, so you can ensure that every update is an opportunity, not a challenge for your business.
Workday updates and why they matter
What are Workday Releases and why do they happen?
Businesses are constantly changing and so is Workday. To ensure optimal performance and maximum value for customers, Workday is constantly updated.
Smaller updates are released weekly, and twice a year more substantial feature updates are grouped into releases, once in March (R1) and once in September (R2).
This allows businesses to plan more easily for these new capabilities. These updates vary in scope but see features updated across Workday modules. To allow for testing and feature implementation, Workday releases a preview of this update five weeks before release.
This ‘preview window’ is a valuable time for businesses to conduct regression testing to ensure that updates will not negatively impact their configuration and, allow them to explore new features to deliver value for the business.
When is the preview window for Workday 2025R1?
To help users prepare for updates and changes, information and previews are released before the update is implemented. The Workday 2025R1 preview window opens on the 8th February and runs until 15th March.
This gives you five weeks to regression test and explore new features. On the 15th March, Workday will implelement new features across production tenants.
How do I know what features are being updated and how they will impact my business?
Releases can contain hundreds of updates, from back-end improvements to major functional changes. To help users understand what these mean for them, Workday release information and guides on their website, Workday Community and within Workday itself. These assets provide critical info on what is being updated and what the new features mean, however, these are not available for users until the beginning of the five-week preview window.
The huge number of smaller updates across modules make it difficult to know what will impact your configuration and what can be ignored. The ‘What’s New in Workday’ report can be generated within Workday itself. This will give insight into how new features impact your specific workstreams, allowing you to create a testing plan and mitigate the potential knock-on effects.
Unfortunately, as your Workday configuration is unique, it is impossible to know exactly what effect updates may have. The potentially critical impact of changes is the core reason that a comprehensive testing approach is non-negotiable.
Register for our webinar on January 23rd and join Workday experts and customers for a deep-dive into what’s new in 2025R1, what this means for you and, how to ensure your update testing is always successful. Register here.
Does Workday continue introducing new changes during the preview window?
The entire update is released at the beginning of the preview window however, like any software update, sometimes minor issues can be unocvered after release. These issues are reported back to Workday by partners and users, and Workday then patch these issues.
So, no significant new changes are implemented but, throughout the five-week preview window, there are small, regular changes to the update. This does not mean that you have to test every single aspect of your configuration, however, we do recommend requesting a tenant refresh before the end of the preview window so that your sandbox preview can directly mirror these changes and you can plan accordingly.
If Workday test their software before release, why do we also need to regression test our configuration?
All Workday releases are thoroughly tested so issues like bugs aren’t an issue. The main reason that businesses need to conduct testing is down to the flexibility of Workday. This means every configuration is different, so testing ensures that your configuration doesn't encounter any unexpected impacts.
As Workday is a workflow-based solution and not a transactional one, processes often intersect, meaning that sometimes a change made in one area can have a knock-on effect elsewhere in your configuration. For example, a change implemented to an absence management BP could have a detrimental effect on a payroll integration.
Failure to properly test your Workday setup could mean that updates have unintended effects on your business processes. Efficient testing ensures the continuity and integrity of critical processes and allows your team to explore and benefit from latest features and functionality, delivering more value for your business.
What to know before you test
We are building an update testing strategy for the first time, what should we prioritise and how do we know that we have tested everything?
Due to the volume of testing required, having a comprehensive testing strategy is the only way to ensure a successful update. Generally, testing strategies don’t test every single BP as this is often not be feasible in the relatively short preview window. Regardless of approach, any testing strategy should prioritise key functionality and business-critical processes.
A risk-based approach is the most suitable way to achieve maximum testing coverage, with minimal resources. This method prioritises high-risk and high-impact aspects of Workday, like highly customised BPs or security configurations.
A good test plan should map out in detail the ‘what’ (scope), ‘when’ (schedule), ‘where’ (tenants) and ‘who’ (staff/SMEs). Determine who needs to be involved across the business, what needs to be tested and, how long this will take. Regardless of how extensively you test Workday, it is unlikely that you will be able to test every single BP but, with a streamlined and managed strategy, you can ensure that the most important aspects of your configuration always work as they should.
In terms of time and resources, what do we need to dedicate to testing to ensure we have ‘covered all bases’?
Like testing requirements, the resources required vary greatly depending on the number of features being updated and the complexity of your specific Workday configuration. It can be difficult to pinpoint exactly who needs to be involved but, major updates require thorough testing and even users with dedicated testing teams can still struggle to test all business processes.
Generally, SMEs from across the business will also need to be included in the testing process due to the specialist knowledge required to test certain processes.
If this release coincides with other business-critical projects, you may find that team members are not available and your testing capacity is not at the level needed. In additon to careful preparations, automated tools like Kainos Smart Test, Workday's preferred testing solution, can help to minimise manual effort, freeing up key team members to focus on high-value workstreams and, moving your business forward.
Testing successfully every time
We have lots of custom reports set up, how do we test to ensure these aren’t affected?
Workday’s reporting functionality is a critical part of the decision-making processes for almost every Workday customer. So, it’s vital to ensure that these reports continue to work as Workday evolves and grows every year. You may have hundreds of reports within your tenant, which can take a significant amount of time to test. A priority approach is often required, with only the most regularly used reports being tested.
The ‘All custom reports’ option in Workday will allow you to identify all of the reports created and, how often they have been used. The most significant problem with reports generally stems from the retirement of specific fields in Workday. These are regularly replaced with new fields as functionality is updated. The ‘All custom reports’ process has a ‘Do not use’ option which will provide information on any retired fields.
As well as addressing these, it is important to test reports as a priority during updates. At the start of the five-week preview window, Sandbox and Sandbox Preview tenants will directly mirror your configuration and data so you can run reports in parallel and compare the results to confirm that reports are running as intended.
We use a large number of third-party integrations for things like payroll, how do we test these effectively?
Integrations are often business critical and more sensitive to data changes so they are always a priority for testing. However, integrations are separate from Workday and can’t be tested in the same way as business processes. When Workday implements changes, your integrations do not change. Testing these effectively involves collaboration from Workday, IT and HRIS teams, as well as external technology partners.
The key to ensuring integrity is to test inputs from Workday and outputs from integrations to ensure accuracy. The most efficient way to do this is by running tests both in sandbox and sandbox preview simultaneously to compare inputs and outputs with your current configuration (sandbox) and with update implementation (sandbox preview).
How can automated testing help my team successfully navigate Workday updates?
Whilst a good strategy and comprehensive testing can help mitigate some of the impacts of Workday updates, automation is most efficient and, often the only way to fully test your Workday configuration. The initial setup for any automated test solution involves understanding your business’ needs and building unique test packs to meet these needs. The setup effort for out-of-the-box software can be significant but it is one-off and tests can be re-run at any time.
How does Kainos Smart Test simplify release testing?
Workday testing needs to be thorough but, it doesn’t have to be a major stress or resource drain. By automating the repetitive task of testing, business can save time, resources and costs whilst expanding their test coverage across their tenant.
Kainos' approach is unique, with a team of experts behind our Built on Workday automated Workday testing tool, Smart Test that help you to understand every single test that needs to be created. It seamlessly keeps business processes, eligibility rules, security, reports and integrations working as they should during and after Workday updates.
Our Smart Test team has helped hundreds of Workday clients plan, execute tests, and troubleshoot issues faster and more accurately than anyone in the Workday ecosystem
Smart Test can cut your update testing effort from weeks to hours, by automatically running tests on every BP. As a result of this, your test strategy becomes as simple as reviewing the results and resolving issues. With intelligent automation, teams are able to be confident in the integrity of critical processes and SMEs are able to explore new functionality and implement new features each release, maximising the value your business gets from their Workday investment.