Capital One credits Smart Test for proactive Workday testing assurance
Project Requirements
- Reduce testing burden on hundreds of SMEs
- Ability to test more than high-utilization business areas
- Become more proactive, rather than reactive to risk
Project Results
- Weekly manual testing efforts reduced by 80%
- 40,000 test cases run in Payroll in hours
- Automated over 2,200 test cases, saving 1,700+ hours
About Capital One
Capital One is a diversified bank that offers a broad array of financial products and services to consumers, small businesses and commercial clients. A Fortune 500 company, Capital One has one of the most widely recognized brands in America. Capital One is the nation’s fifth-largest consumer bank and eighth-largest bank overall. Mr. Richard D. Fairbank is founder, Chairman, Chief Executive Officer, and President of Capital One Financial Corporation. Mr. Fairbank has been the CEO since the Company’s Initial Public Offering in November 1994 and has served as the Chairman and CEO since February 1995. Headquartered in Virginia, USA, it operates in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, India and Philippines and employs over 51,000 people.
Workday’s ‘Power of One’ concept the catalyst for change
In 2015, Capital One selected Workday as part of a cloud-first digital transformation strategy. Until that point, the business was operating multiple, siloed systems.
Following a rigorous vendor selection process, Capital One made the decision to move to Workday because of its unified ‘Power of One’ approach, and the ability to empower both back-office teams and employees right across the organisation. Capital One went live with Workday HCM, Payroll, Absence, Performance Management and Time Tracking in September 2015, Recruiting in 2016 and Advanced Compensation in 2018.
Manual testing approach not fit to scale
With a robust Workday platform now live and being successfully adopted by the organisation, Capital One had big plans to expand its Workday footprint with new modules and ongoing optimisation. When rolling out the roadmap, the business soon realised that manual testing of new configuration changes, alongside weekly platform updates would not be sustainable.
Shelly McKee-Sutton, Workday Platform Master System Architect at Capital One says, “Hundreds of employees were testing each of their specific areas weekly, logging everything through our issue tracking software, Jira. Because of the sheer volume of requests, we could often only test high-priority business areas, such as Payroll and Absence. Other business processes, such as performance management, were not tested as rigorously due to these areas running on a less cyclical basis.”
Shelly continues, “Just as many other organisations face, there could be hundreds of items on the Friday weekly release notes, and we couldn’t test everything before Monday morning. We were doing a great job of testing the things that we should have tested, but we didn't always have the capacity to test everything as a ‘just in case’.”
Six months spent on update testing
In addition to continuous weekly testing, the HRIS team and SMEs were constrained by the time and effort involved in testing Workday’s bi-annual feature releases.
Shelly describes, "At Capital One, we found ourselves testing beyond just the five-week preview window. When the ‘What's New?’ report came out, we would go straight to ‘Automatically Available’ because we didn’t want to find out about something when it went live. We needed to know what it looked like, if it was going to be a benefit to us, or if it was something that wasn’t going to work. We had to prioritize quickly and take a more risk-based approach rather than being able to confidently know we had full test coverage in all areas.”
“We were spending about 12 weeks in total on each bi-annual release. That’s 24 weeks – almost half a year - just to do testing. The amount of regression testing that would need to take place was tremendous, and that was even just looking at those high-utilisation areas.”
Scalable automation to manage testing proactively
The HRIS team had ambitions to move from a reactive support model to a proactive one. With over 50,000 associates and increasing compliance regulations, Capital One knew automation would be the only solution to help achieve this.
Shelly describes, “It was as much about alleviating the manual pressure on testing that was being done as it was to find solutions for getting ahead of things that weren’t being done. It was a case of, ‘How do we manage this more proactively, instead of reactively?” says Shelly.
After considering several options, Smart Test was selected due to the sheer breadth of its capability and the fact it is a dedicated Workday testing product. Smart Test was deployed in December 2019 and now helps Shelly and the team to test HCM, Payroll and Security.
Hands-on weekly testing reduced by 80%
With automated, scalable Workday testing in place, the team at Capital One is now freed up to work on more high-value, strategic projects.
“Every Friday morning, we still review the service update list to look for things that could have an impact on us. But what we're not doing anymore is having to manually run all these transactions to see how that impacts us. Smart Test takes care of the weekly testing; all we need to do is look at the Smart Test dashboard or build a test case if there isn’t one. Our reporting team isn't even a part of our testing cycle anymore, because those reports are just running automatically.
“Payroll is the biggest area for us in Capital One and we can now run 40,000+ test cases in Payroll in just a matter of hours. To have that confirmation that everyone will get paid, on time, and the right amount, that’s huge for us. When it comes to risk, we have checks and balances in place and it’s now about finding those nuanced test cases that would normally have gone unnoticed until they became an issue.”
Leveraging teams’ strengths while increasing test coverage
Instead of spending up to 12 weeks testing before, during and after the bi-annual update, the global team at Capital One can now test in just four weeks, allowing more time to explore Workday’s new functionality.
Shelly explains, “Smart does all the heavy lifting. All we need to do is review the report and analysis, make the fixes and re-run. Automation has meant that our associates can work on tasks that benefit their skill sets. Before Smart Test, we used over 180 employees to do regression testing for feature releases, and you simply cannot hire an SME to test all the time. Our employees can focus on the things we hired them to do, and they want to do, but still have the testing completed. When release notes come out, we can now concentrate on, ‘What will benefit my process and my team?’, instead of, ‘Has anything adverse happened?’ With each update, we’re reducing the manual intervention of testing more and more, while increasing the items that are being tested.”
Shelly concludes, “For anyone considering Smart Test, I’d say think about all the things that are not getting tested and the risks that presents. It’s about peace of mind; how do you quantify that? I would also add that this has truly been a partnership that has allowed us to share ideas and exchange ways of doing things. Kainos is always just at the end of a phone call and having that level of comfort and trust, rather than a straight vendor relationship, has been important.”