IBM Maximo is a comprehensive Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) platform used across industries to manage assets, work orders, inventory, procurement, and more. Due to its complexity and business-critical role, ensuring Maximo’s reliability, performance, and accuracy is vital, particularly during upgrades, customizations, or system integrations.
Manual testing of Maximo applications is time-consuming, inconsistent, and often fails to uncover regressions or issues introduced by changes in configurations, workflows, or automation scripts. Frequent Maximo updates and security patches further increase the demand for repeatable, rigorous testing, making manual approaches increasingly unsustainable.
Why Automated Testing Is Crucial for DevOps
A purpose-built automation tool for Maximo delivers significant advantages:
- Accelerated Testing Cycles: Run tests quickly and frequently to provide immediate feedback during development and deployment.
- Robust Regression Coverage: Re-run test suites with ease to ensure that existing functionality remains stable after changes.
- Increased Accuracy: Automated execution eliminates human error and ensures consistent, repeatable test results.
- Cost Efficiency: Drastically reduce the cost of manual testing and free up valuable QA resources.
- Support for Complex Workflows: Maximo’s dynamic UI, conditional logic, and industry add-ons require a testing tool that understands how to interact intelligently with the system.
An effective automation solution boosts deployment confidence, minimizes downtime, and streamlines quality assurance, making it an essential asset for any organization relying on Maximo.
MaxQA – Automation Without the Coding Overhead
Most test automation frameworks today require test authors to have at least intermediate programming skills. As a result, organizations face high costs and long lead times in developing and maintaining test scripts.
MaxQA eliminates that barrier.
With MaxQA, writing automated regression test cases is as simple as using Excel. Test authors only need basic familiarity with XPath and spreadsheet logic — MaxQA takes care of the programming in the background.
Built with flexibility in mind, MaxQA is application- and platform-agnostic. This enables QA teams to automate end-to-end business processes that span across multiple web applications.
Common Critical Business Processes that require regression tests
- Service Request Creation ➝ Work Order Completion
- Preventative Maintenance Plan ➝ Work Order Compliance
- Work Planning ➝ Material Requisition ➝ Procurement ➝ Work Execution
- Inventory Issue / Return / Transfer
- Purchase Order ➝ Material / Service Receipt ➝ Invoice
Common cross-functional end-to-end integration tests:
- Service Order to Repair: CRM ➝ Maximo
- Procurement and Invoicing: Maximo ↔ ERP
- Condition Monitoring: SCADA / DCS / ITS / TPS ➝ Maximo
Below is an example of a test script that verifies that the Service Order to Repair process works smoothly:
- Create a new Service Request
- Enter the SR details, including: Summary, Details, Asset Number, Priority, Owner Group
- Create a follow-up Work Order
- Verify the WO is created with the correct details, such as Asset Number, Work Type, Priority, Owner Group, Target Start Date
- Progress the Work Order through to Completion
- Ensure the originating Service Request is updated to Resolved
The above test case takes 34 lines of instructions in Excel and takes less than a few hours to write, test, and deploy.
Below is a quick peek at how it works
