The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently released recommendations on how organizations should use case management solutions to manage returning to onsite work in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the CDC, case management tools can “make the traditional contact tracing process faster and more efficient” by streamlining data capture and management and merging workflows with other workforce management solutions such as surveillance systems.

As many countries face another wave of COVID-19 cases, organizations around the world are planning new ways to keep their workforces safe. Leading companies have made huge strides in managing coronavirus while keeping their workplaces open. But despite how far we’ve come, many employees still doubt that their organizations are ready to respond to COVID-19.

Automation was already well on its way to becoming a ubiquitous investment in 2020, then the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated interest and adoption. Organizations started deploying Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), and other automation capabilities en masse, which interacted with mission-critical systems, legacy applications, and workers in both the front and back office.

Testing is a critical step if you want to ensure quality in your products. It’s crucial to test your applications to make sure they work properly – otherwise, customers are less likely to buy or continue to use them. While important, software testing can be a repetitive process that takes time and resources you’d probably rather use for tasks that deliver innovation to the functionality or performance. This is where test automation comes in.

Even before COVID-19 became the biggest challenge to operational resilience in a generation, organizations were struggling with a gap between digital transformation and internal processes that felt decidedly “pre-digital.” Automation presents a solution, connecting new tools to old, legacy systems through three key shifts in technology.

Having an effective test automation system is an absolute necessity in today’s agile software development environments. Automation works great, especially in case of smoke and regression tests and helps the QA teams to easily create and execute test cases that are complex in nature. Though automation can act as a power booster for your product pipeline of development projects, there are certain pitfalls in automation which slow down the automation pipelines if not tackled upfront.

Suddenly there’s a crisis. What do you do? Many organizations responded to the COVID-19 crisis by quickly automating with digitally-distanced work processes such as telemedicine, digital learning, working from home and the like. But few were positioned to do it well. So says best-selling author George Westerman in his essay: Digital Transformation Isn’t Really a Technology Challenge.

If your COVID-19 reopening plans have gone through more phases than you can count, you’re not alone. What was once planned for October has pushed to January or June or maybe never. Even the companies that have managed to get back onsite or into the office often live in constant vigilance, knowing that a single positive COVID-19 test could send them into lockdown.