Once you are live on UKG Dimensions, it’s time to shift your focus to managing changes 24/7. 

These changes may result from adopting new features, revised business policies, new labor laws, or the need to accept the latest UKG release. 

These constant changes may seem small but can cause severe disruptions to your business, negatively affect your employees’ paychecks, and open your organization up to legal action.  

A continuous testing program helps you proactively test every change to your UKG solution, ensuring you protect your organization, pay employees correctly, and stay compliant. 

What is UKG Continuous Testing?

UKG Continuous Testing is a repeatable process where you create and run test cases to verify every production change made to your UKG solution.    

These tests (often called regression tests) ensure that any change you make functions correctly and doesn’t negatively affect previously working functionality. This is a practice in which testing is done as a part of the IT Change Management process. 

These regression tests should validate a broad range of system functionality, and we strongly recommended that you give particular focus to validating your employee’s pay and benefits 

Why You Need Continuous Testing for UKG Dimensions

The changes you make to UKG Dimensions can be compliance, business or UKG driven: 

Many UKG Dimensions customers don’t realize that they are responsible for testing their UKG solution until it’s too late. To be clear, it is YOUR responsibility to ensure that any new software changes are tested thoroughly and won’t disrupt your UKG configuration, employee workflows, and employees’ paychecks. 

If you don’t validate these changes, it could lead to production errors that have significant and unintended consequences for your organization, as well as your workforce and brand. 

You need to make these changes quickly and effectively while maintaining your normal day-to-day operations to stay competitive.  

Benefits of UKG Continuous Testing

1. Reduce the risks of making changes to UKG Dimensions   

One of the most significant benefits of UKG Dimensions is the ease and flexibility to update pay rules, accruals, and other business logic. With continuous testing, you can quickly respond to changing business needs, reduce the risk of the new changes negatively impacting your organization, and be more confident to deploy those changes to production. 

2. Saves your organization and subject matter experts (SMEs) time 

A well-defined continuous testing process reduces the time needed to plan, write, and run the tests required to validate each production change.  

Often these required changes are time-sensitive, and the timeline is out of your control. So you may need to do regression testing at inconvenient times for your business, e.g., during a season change freeze period.  

However, since the tests are documented with easy-to-understand step-by-step instructions, they can be run by someone who has no intimate experience with your system. 

3. Accept UKG releases and updates with confidence 

Accepting new UKG releases and updates is a must. New releases are chock full of valuable features, critical security updates, product improvements, defect fixes, and performance improvements. 

However, validating that a new UKG release won’t have a negative impact on your system or your employees is your responsibility. UKG provides the Early Access Experience specifically for you to validate your configuration before releasing it to your production environment. 

A continuous testing process gives you the confidence to accept a UKG release or update.  

4 Keys to UKG Continuous Testing

A successful UKG Continuous Testing program is:  

• Documented: Every test is captured with step-by-step instructions written in plain English with clear expected results. Everyone can easily understand these tests, and even a novice user with deep subject matter expertise can run them. 
• Repeatable: A repeatable set of tests are stored in a known location for future re-use and do not need to be re-created with each change which saves significant time and effort.  
• Maintained: All tests are considered valuable assets and are maintained as part of an IT change management process that ensures they are current and valid when needed.  
• Automated: Best practice continuous testing programs are fully automated and can be executed quickly, and don’t require subject matter experts (SMEs) to be available.

Summary

Continuous testing provides a repeatable process to test your UKG solution faster, more often, and with confidence. You’re able to validate every change to production to ensure the changes won’t adversely impact your system, business, or employees. 

Best of breed continuous testing programs are fully automated, enabling you to run tests frequently and quickly without any human engagement. Typically, an automated solution helps to reduce the burden of manual testing by 90%.