We recently hosted a webinar on everything you need to build a risk-based testing strategy for SAP which you can watch here and see the full deck here. At the end of the webinar, there was an excellent discussion about using test automation and Worksoft Certify Impact (Certify Impact) for risk-based testing strategy for SAP with product manager, Chris Kraus.

We’ve highlighted some of the hot topics that were discussed below.

Q: Does Certify Impact support manual testing?

A: Yes. When we perform the transport analysis we show you the Tcodes and the programs that are changing. If you don’t have a very large automated library, you can then use the tool to figure out what Tcodes don’t have automated tests and focus your manual tests there.

Q: You referred to a change-management approach using SAP Solution Manager (Solman) and mentioned TBOMs. What is a TBOM?

A: TBOM stands for Technical Bill of Materials.  A TBOM contains a list of all objects involved in a transaction including function modules, tables, and user interface elements. From Solution Manager, you start a trace, run through your transaction, then turn off the trace. Solution Manager collects the list of objects used in the transaction. Business Process Change Analyzer (BPCA) compares objects in a transport against objects in a TBOM to determine what is affected by a given transport.

Q: Does Certify Impact pick up all the sub-processes as well as end-to-end processes? Is it confusing in terms of knowing what to test?

A: One of the primary benefits of Certify Impact is its ability to determine what and where to test. Certify Impact identifies the affected Tcodes and programs.  It correlates those Tcodes and programs back to individual Certify processes and sub-processes.  It then walks the Certify process tree to identify top-level (end-to-end) Certify Impact processes.  When you execute those top-level processes, it will execute all the corresponding sub-processes. This simplifies the entire process. Certify Impact does all the heavy lifting in the analysis engine so you don’t have to worry about it.

Q: What is the difference in output between Solman BPCA and Certify Impact during analysis of a transport?

A: Certify Impact examines objects in a transport and traces the where-used graph to identify affected Tcodes and programs. BPCA compares objects in a transport to objects in a TBOM to determine what is affected.  Since a TBOM is generated by tracing a transaction at runtime, BPCA has a more detailed understanding of the objects used. From our standpoint in testing, we don’t need to understand that level of detail.  What we need to know is what end-to-end business processes were affected by the change. For example— if your goal is to survey an area on a map to see where the creeks are, Worksoft Certify Impact will give you that high level view, it will tell you how to navigate along the creek to get to a bridge.  BPCA in addition to showing you this will also tell you how wide and deep the creek is. BPCA provides much more granular data.

It is also important to note that Certify Impact can use its own transport analysis or the transport analysis of BPCA.  If you have not set up your business process hierarchy or generated TBOMs, then you can use the transport analysis that comes with Certify Impact.  If you have made the investment to build a business process hierarchy and generate TBOMs, then you can use BPCA for transport analysis.  BPCA analysis results can still be used by Certify Impact to correlate back to Certify processes which allows you to run Certify processes and to see coverage gaps in your automated tests based on BPCA analysis.

Q: In relation to end-to-end testing, is Certify Impact able to highlight the risks with SAP Portal transactions?

A: Certify Impact can analyze any transport and identify affected Tcodes and programs.  However, web based applications like SRM, CRM, and portal based applications present a challenge.  There is no way to correlate Tcodes and programs back to Certify processes involving web applications.  This is something Worksoft wants to address in the future.  For now, Certify Impact has no ability to identify coverage gaps or recommend tests to run for web based applications.

Q: Do I need additional licensing for Certify Impact?

A: Yes. Worksoft Certify is the automated test harness. Worksoft Certify Impact is an add-on to Worksoft Certify that requires an additional license.

Q: If TBOM and BPCA is not configured properly or at all, will Certify Impact still work?

A: Yes. This is another key advantage of Certify Impact. You don’t need to have an SAP Business Blueprint or a TBOM to use Impact.  We have our own code, and we do all the analysis with our own code. So, you don’t need a TBOM or BPCA, nor do you have to keep them updated.

Q: Does Certify Impact gather information for a specific SAP user or the entire test system?

A: Certify Impact is doing this at the transport level so it’s any changes to the system itself.  Your STO3 data is going to do use counts across the system itself.

Q: Does Certify Impact identify the transaction codes?

A: Yes. Certify Impact examines objects in a transport and traces the where-used graph to identify affected Tcodes and programs.

Q: I understand that Worksoft recently released Worksoft Certify 10.  Are there any changes in the Certify Impact product related to Certify 10?

A: Yes. In Certify Impact 10 performance was greatly improved.  In the past when you selected the transport we started the analysis, now we analyze the transports in the background.  It’s configurable, but most people have set it to every 15 minutes.  We look for new transports moving in the QA system. We pre-analyze them so that from the user’s perspective, transport analysis results are returned immediately.

Q: As a current Worksoft Certify customer: for end-to-end testing across multiple environments, do you have to use Certify for automated testing in all environments to take advantage of Certify Impact?

A: Yes. Because Worksoft Certify not only sees the UI action but understands the SAP data behind the field.  We look at your Worksoft Certify processes to figure out the SAP programs and objects and Tcodes that are being tested. Certify Impact then does the mapping.  If you use something like Selenium for Web UI, we can’t get the data we need for the query.

Q: In a new implementation scenario – how could risk-based testing be used? Would you even use it as an approach at all?

A: It doesn’t matter if you’ve got an established system with 5,000 automated tests or a brand-new system with five automated tests, understanding what’s in a transport and how large it is, and what it is going to do is just as critical.  You need to know what is in the transport and what needs to be tested. You can then start growing overlap of those as you build your automation libraries and you get more automated in your risk-based testing approach. For cases where you do not have automated tests, Certify Impact can identify coverage gaps so you know what needs to be manually tested.

Q: Can Certify Impact highlight the objects affected in the Worksoft database with the affected Tcode?

A: Yes. We surface the Certify processes to you so that you know what to run.  Certify Impact looks at what objects changed and then gives you the Certify process that executes that object or exercises that object. When we visualize it, we keep it at the process level itself.

Q: I’ve heard quite a bit lately about Worksoft Analyze.  Can you explain a little bit more about what that is?

A: Worksoft Analyze is a cool solution that does automated business process discovery.  What we found is when people are building automated tests, or maybe they’re going through a merger/acquisition or doing a systems consolidation, they need to understand what their existing business processes are first. This info is needed to map the existing as-is business state, and then map those to the new processes in the new system.  This was a real pain point for most of our customers. Worksoft Analyze eliminates that pain. It can be used to auto discover and visualize existing processes.  It shows you your variance in your business processes and how many people are running the same types of business processes and consolidates them.

Are there any questions you wish that we had answered? Connect with us on social media to let us know!