Enterprise 21 ERP Testing

Anushree Chatterjee

Enterprise 21 ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) is a comprehensive, web-based software solution designed to streamline and integrate the core business processes of an organization. It is developed by Technology Group International (TGI) and is primarily targeted at small to mid-sized manufacturing and distribution companies. The software helps businesses manage various aspects of their operations, such as:

• Order Management
• Inventory Management
• Warehouse Management
• Procurement
• Manufacturing Management
• Planning
• Financial Management
• CRM
• Business Intelligence
• eCommerce
• EDI
• Project Accounting

Enterprise 21 ERP Testing

You might choose to integrate Enterprise 21 ERP within your ecosystem of business tools. That means you need to test the various system integrations and look at the entire user experience while working with the whole system.

The types of testing that you should focus on are:

• End-to-end Testing: There are many workflows that your users will use on a daily basis. It is a good idea to test them thoroughly before making them available to users.
• Integration Testing: Given that Enterprise 21 can interface with other systems like Microsoft Office, barcoding systems, and more, it becomes crucial to conduct integration tests. For example, if you’ve integrated with online service providers for immediate credit card authorization for sales orders and accounts receivable processing, then you need to check those well.
• Usability Testing: If you’ve customized the UI or made some integrations, it’s crucial to ensure the system is user-friendly and intuitive, especially since a diverse range of users are going to interact with this ERP system.
• Security Testing: While the individual modules might be secure, you need to test the entire system as a whole so that your system is secure, end to end. This could involve testing different user roles to make sure they only have access to the data and features they’re authorized to use.
• Performance Testing: Check how the ERP performs under different conditions like handling many users at once or processing large amounts of data.
• Regression Testing: Through regression testing, you can ensure that your entire system is functioning properly, irrespective of the updates happening within the different modules. For example, if the Order Management module and another third-party integration like the barcode printing system are updated, then your system should still continue to function correctly.

Challenges in Enterprise 21 ERP Testing

Testing Enterprise 21 ERP – or any ERP system – can be challenging because these systems are large, complex, and deeply integrated into your business processes. They are ultra-flexible and meant to be tailor-made for your organization’s unique needs and processes. Moreover, it might get tricky with time because these systems have release updates, new patches, and configuration changes every now and then. This means that testing at the time of setup isn’t enough. You are going to have to constantly keep running tests on your system to monitor its health.

Both manual and automated methods can be used for the testing mentioned above. Traditionally, these checks are run manually by QA teams or a few assigned team members. With your organization’s growth, the Enterprise 21 ERP workflows get complicated, and the volume of data being handled also turns massive. Manual testing could be time-consuming and prone to errors. Plus, it’s hard to cover everything with manual checks, given the vast breadth of the system.

Additionally, manually testing all scenarios across various browser combinations can be challenging. That is where test automation comes in to save you from all this validation chaos. It can save you a ton of time and make sure everything runs smoothly, with minimum effort. But, of course, it is not all sunshine and rainbows.

Here are the main challenges you might face while automating Enterprise 21 ERP testing:

• Constant Updates and Maintenance: ERP systems keep evolving and growing. Add to that the fact that you’ve integrated other modules and third-party tools and services, along with special customizations to the default modules. There’s a high probability of change, and your automation scripts might break when any of these tools release new changes. You have to keep an eye on these changes and have the test scripts updated and maintained accordingly.
• Complex UI: The power of ERP systems lies in their ability to handle complex business workflows. Consequently, it reflects on its user interface with dynamic object IDs, nested iFrames, and detailed object trees. Automating it with traditional automation tools is like solving a puzzle; now and then, it will put you in a tight spot.
• Custom Reports: The reports here are tailor-made for your specific needs, and automating them with legacy test automation tools requires your engineers to have expertise in programming skills.
• Test Data: Handling massive, varied data and sensitive information is a big deal. You need to be super careful with it. It requires the use of test data management to extract, mask, edit, and maintain the test data. Moreover, this test data must be a realistic representation of the real data, else it is just a waste of resources.
• Skilled Engineers: You need smart people who know their way around automation tools and coding. Finding and keeping them can be a real challenge. But here’s the twist – automation knowledge alone won’t suffice. The one building test cases needs to know “what” they are testing. That kind of domain language usually lies with non-technical team members and manual testers who are usually not adept in coding.

Automated Enterprise 21 ERP Testing

While challenges do exist in both manual and automated testing, the best way ahead is to understand what to automate and what to do manually. Tricky workflows that have changing data and require human intellect can be manually checked. They could be for end-to-end, security, performance, integration, usability, or even regression tests. Whereas the repetitive, predictable, data-driven use cases should be automated.

You can find multiple automation tools in the market to perform different types of testing. However, it is better to choose one that can take care of most of your testing needs and is easy for your team to use as well.

testRigor for Enterprise 21 ERP Testing

testRigor consistently stays a step ahead of its competitors as an intelligent test automation tool. Its distinctive features make it stand out as a cloud-based, AI-driven, codeless automation tool. This will let you test end-to-end, regression, UI, functional, API, and even some database test cases with ease.

Here’s how it simplifies Enterprise 21 testing:

• AI test generation: Utilizing generative AI, testRigor facilitates the automatic creation of test scripts. The person only needs to provide the test case title or description.
• Easy test script creation/maintenance: testRigor allows crafting test cases in plain English which eliminates the need for programming languages. This approach empowers anyone to create or modify test cases and simplifying the script debugging process. Moreover, testRigor’s AI capabilities automatically incorporate these new changes in the test scripts and result in unparalleled stability, saving you countless weekly maintenance hours.
• Cross-browser and cross-platform support: With testRigor, you can write test cases that can run across various browsers, browser versions, and platforms.
• Custom element locators: testRigor doesn’t depend on unreliable XPaths or CSS selectors. Instead, it employs a unique method of identifying elements powered by its AI algorithms. Users can specify the element’s name or its position, such as click “cart” or click on button “Delete” below “Section Name” to the right of “label”.
• Seamless integrations: testRigor offers built-in integrations with most CI/CD tools, test management systems, defect tracking solutions, infrastructure providers, and communication applications.
• Test data support: Manage your test data like a pro. It can generate all sorts of data (there are 50+ built-in test data types), which is perfect for testing complex workflows containing email, phone numbers, names, URLs, credit card numbers, SSNs, Google authenticator codes, etc.
• Support for other types of testing: Along with end-to-end testing, you can create regression tests, functional tests, API tests, and even UI validations. testRigor offers powerful capabilities that let you automate 2FA, email testing, SMS and phone call testing, working with tables, and much more.

login
navigate to warehouse inventory page //reusable rule
enter stored value “productCode” in “Search”
check that table "inventory" at row containing "000" and column "Open POs" has value "2255.00"

The example above demonstrates how simple it is to create test scripts in testRigor. It is just like writing manual test cases. Through data-driven testing and reusable rules, you can use the same set of data and test steps respectively across different test cases.

The points mentioned above are just a glimpse of the many impressive features that testRigor offers. You can explore all the fantastic functionalities here. You can also sign up for a demo and begin your exploration here.

“We spent so much time on maintenance when using Selenium, and we spend nearly zero time with maintenance using testRigor.”

Keith Powe VP Of Engineering - IDT