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The Workday Release Testing Playbook

Week 8 of 8

Keeping up

Every Workday customer moves to the new release on the same day. You cannot defer it, so the only variable is how ready you are. Two five-week windows a year, plus weekly updates and your own changes, add up to a lot of regression.

The teams that keep up treat the regression suite as a product. Every release defect and every hypercare defect becomes a test. Tests create their own data so a refresh does not break them. And the most repeated tests, run side by side in two tenants twice a year, are the first candidates for automation.

This week: make the suite better every window

  1. Rank your business processes by business impact and how often Workday or your team changes them. Automate from the top.
  2. Turn every release regression and hypercare defect into a test, so it cannot come back unnoticed.
  3. Make test data a property of each test: create or find the worker, supplier or pay group it needs, instead of hard-coding IDs a refresh will wipe.
  4. Measure three things per window: critical process coverage, days to finish the regression run, and defects found in production after the release.
  5. Hold a 30-minute lessons-learned after each production date, and change the plan for the next window before you forget.

Number of the week

11,500+

organizations, including more than 65% of the Fortune 500, use Workday, and each takes the same release on the same date.

Source: Workday fiscal 2027 Q2 results (August 2026)

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