We sometimes forget that it’s not only manufacturing, consumer goods, oil and gas, pharmaceutical and insurance companies that rely on end-to-end business processes and critical enterprise apps, but technology companies do too. And these software companies face the same challenges – complexity and change across their landscape, exposure to risk, the demand to deliver software to the business faster. SAP’s internal IT department is no different.

With more than a decade spent as the leading provider of automation solutions for SAP software, we were thrilled that SAP’s internal IT team agreed to share their agile testing success story at the 2017 Worksoft Customer Conference. The company recognized that a large component of driving a successful digital journey was to implement an agile testing strategy to ensure quality across internal business systems.

When it came to selecting a test automation provider, SAP determined that Worksoft Certify was the most suitable complementary solution to their own tool, CBTA. They were also looking for a solution that covered non-SAP technologies – like web applications – and integrated seamlessly with SAP’s Solution Manager (read more about this later in the blog). Additional factors in their decision were that Worksoft is easy to use and maintain, can be used by business analysts and doesn’t require programming skills.

High Frequency Agile Releases

SAP IT’s vision was to successfully automate end-to-end functional tests across the systems and applications that support their core business processes. Their goal was to achieve at least 50 percent automated coverage of processes they categorized as “high frequency of use” or “high risk.” Compared to manual testing, SAP knew that automation would bring a number of business benefits – all in support of achieving high frequency agile software releases:

  • Run tests faster – reduce time required to run end-to-end tests
  • Reduce risks of blind spots and human errors – reduce testing errors and improve coverage
  • Run tests more often – eliminate manual effort and increase frequency of running regression tests

Testing Early and Often

SAP wanted to apply agile testing techniques with a ‘test early and often’ approach. This helped them to achieve 72 percent overall regression testing coverage, including:

  • Faster time to delivery, validation and value through sprint cycles
  • Higher adaptability and more options to reprioritize scope jointly along backlog process
  • Enhanced end-user centricity through joint responsibility of business and IT
  • Increased quality of delivery through close and facilitated collaboration between business and IT

SAP IT is committed to continuous improvement and a high frequency agile release strategy. They recognized that in order to keep pace with change and to digitally transform their testing strategy, they needed to adopt end-to-end business process test automation. This approach has proven to save time, lower technology risk and reduce costs.

SAP benefits.

SAP Solution Manager

[sidequote quote="SAP IT uses SAP Solution Manager for test preparation, test execution, test reporting and defect management. They have achieved end-to-end test automation success with an integrated approach using SolMan, CBTA and Worksoft Certify." side=right]SAP Solution Manager is application life cycle management (ALM) software that includes the processes, tools, services, and an organizational model to manage SAP and non-SAP solutions. Like SAP’s internal IT department, many companies look to integrate their ALM tool with their test automation solution. Doing so allows organizations to combine the strengths of Worksoft’s automation platform with those of Solution Manager to create a complete end-to-end testing framework. The seamless integration enables companies to:

  • Execute Worksoft Certify test automation from SAP Solution Manager
  • Deliver a high rate of test coverage for SAP business processes that may also include non-SAP segments
  • Provide detailed defect reporting for both automated and manual testing, including screen capture, narrative, and the steps to reproduce
  • Manage unattended, scheduled execution (lights-out) of regression tests or enterprise test suites
  • Document the use of SAP software and automatically discover the “as-is” business processes required to configure business blueprints in SAP Solution Manager
  • Update TBOMs with automation for use of the Business Process Change Analyzer (BPCA) to determine test scope for risk based test planning and execution
  • Use automated test repair workflows to fix damaged tests

The new release SAP Solution Manager 7.2 supports an existing IT landscape but also can help companies optimize the value of SAP S/4HANA. This will be significant as companies make the move to S/4HANA and need effective end-to-end test automation.