Sharing Reliability-Centered ATF Best Practices from Recent Research Paper

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GitHub Discussion Post: Sharing Reliability-Centered ATF Best Practices from Recent Research Paper

🚀 New Paper: Reliability-Centered Automation Testing for ServiceNow ATF – Practical Patterns to Cut Flakes & Boost CI/CD
Hey ServiceNow devs! 👋

I've been deep in ATF (Automated Test Framework) challenges like brittle UI steps, data flakiness, and slow pipelines. Just published a comprehensive paper on a reliability-centered approach to make ATF rock-solid for enterprise ITSM/HRSD/CSM workflows:

Reliability-Centered Automation Testing for the ServiceNow Platform with Automated Test Framework (ATF)
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Key takeaways & patterns

Failure Mode Taxonomy (Table 1 in paper): Pinpoints 5 top killers – data nondeterminism, role/ACL issues, UI drift, timing races, weak diagnostics.

Impersonation-First: Always impersonate As() real personas (requester/approver) – no more admin false positives!

Deterministic Fixtures: ATF_REQ_${sys_id()} – create/isolate data per test, zero shared state.

Risk-Tiered Suites: Smoke (<10min), Regression (<45min), Upgrade – bind to change risk via TIA (Test Impact Analysis).

Anti-Flake Sync: Poll business signals (e.g., approval state) not sleeps.

Metrics SLOs: Track flake rate ≤2%, MTTD ≤4hrs – dashboards segment by domain.

CI/CD Blueprint: Integrate with GitHub Actions – smoke gates block merges, full regression post-deploy. Phased roadmap in Table 4 gets you from zero to hero in weeks.

Full pattern catalog + code snippets attached (or [link to Gist/repo]). Tried these? Reduced my flake rate 60% across upgrades!

Questions:

Best GitHub Actions workflow for ATF + scoped apps?

Anyone using AI for flake prediction (per section 8)?

Cross-scope testing tips (ITSM → HRSD)?

Download the paper and share the results! Let's make ATF production-grade. 🔥

#ServiceNow #ATF #CI/CD #DevOps #Testing

Paper: Patel, N. (2026) Reliability-Centered Automation Testing for the ServiceNow Platform with Automated Test Framework (ATF). Technology and Investment, 17, 77-89. doi: 10.4236/ti.2026.171006.