Unlocking Efficiency with Cloud-Based SAP Testing in Production Environments

Digital transformation is a driving force behind new models and approaches today. Enterprises need to adapt quickly and creatively to reap the benefits of the digital economy. One key aspect of this transformation involves cloud-based SAP testing, essential in building a reliable SAP production and release environment.

This insightful blog explores the strengths and capabilities of Cigniti, SAP, and Tricentis, which are vital to ensuring successful large-scale SAP transformations. Organizations can reduce costs and accelerate the time to value by utilizing proven approaches and various tools.

Testing SAP Requires Tackling Three Key Challenges Head-On

Organizations are embracing cloud-based SAP transformations to enhance their scalability, improve uptime, increase availability, and accelerate implementation while optimizing costs.

Agile and SAP DevOps delivery models are becoming essential for successful digital transformations, and several fundamental trends are driving their adoption:

1. Faster time to value

Organizations are increasingly transitioning from the waterfall method to the Agile and DevOps way to achieve quicker delivery, improved quality, predictable outcomes, and a better overall user experience, and it is essential to implement Agile and DevOps methodologies for SAP.

This requires specialized automation tools for both technical and functional aspects to support efficient delivery and continuous change management.

Additionally, it is critical to establish a strong development and testing process that allows for constant feedback from business teams regarding the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) delivered by the scrum teams.

2. Outstanding business proficiency

The SAP cloud platform empowers organizations to leverage open APIs and use side-by-side extensibility to integrate external content deployed in the SAP Cloud Platform (SCP) with their SAP S/4 HANA cloud system.

3. Adapting quickly to business changes

Many organizations are switching from customized SAP ECC setups to a more standardized and simplified SAP S/4HANA system. SAP automation tools, pre-made content, and regular updates make this transition possible, enabling improved flexibility.

This change requires implementing SAP S/4HANA Cloud MTE (Multi-Tenant Edition), STE (Single Tenant Edition), or SAP S/4HANA on-premise version or streamlining existing systems. SAP DevOps and agile delivery models can handle these large-scale transformations and upgrades.

Organizations must have a strong SAP testing capability with a clear strategy, proven approaches, established processes, and advanced toolsets to successfully implement the SAP DevOps delivery model. This allows organizations to identify early development defects, analyze SAP custom code, and conduct impact-based regression testing, optimizing testing while reducing effort and cost.

Effective test management is essential for Agile project delivery, continuous testing, and test automation, resulting in rapid agile-based SAP development and deployment for a unified user experience. Many organizations use a CI/CD approach for their SAP development projects through SAP ChaRM to fit their unique SAP landscape and release management needs.

To implement Agile or DevOps methodologies in SAP development and establish a CI/CD pipeline without requiring substantial investments, prioritizing defect-free releases, minimizing testing cycle duration, and cutting down on quality-related expenses is crucial.

To achieve this, traditional approaches such as manual functional testing, script-based test automation, and testing every test case must be more agile and cost-effective.

Embrace ‘Shift Left’ Strategy: Proactively Prepare for Optimal Testing and Test Automation

Are you aware that Cigniti, SAP, and Tricentis have come together to offer a comprehensive solution to SAP testing challenges?

Their integrated approach includes several in-house SAP accelerators and tools, such as Cigniti’s genie, utilizing pre-built test scenarios and cases from a dedicated repository to ensure a seamless SAP S/4HANA transformation. Cigniti’s SAP business process recorder can also convert existing SAP processes into detailed documentation, reducing the need for extensive test design.

In addition, the SAP test data miner assists in identifying and extracting SAP test data, while modern business process capture tools like Celonis can capture and analyze existing SAP processes. With this range of tools and support, tackling SAP testing challenges has never been more efficient and effective.

• Leverage ready-to-use test scenarios and test cases from our pre-built S4HANA repository
• Identify and create new test cases for a given functionality
• Use the predefined content as a template
• Modify the template as per client-specific requirements

SAP offers test automation tools, such as ATC, CBTA, and START, which automate testing and provide pre-automated test cases for reuse. The SAP Solman 7.2 Test Suite also assists with SAP testing for all SAP transformations. Integration with test management tools like JIRA allows for effective agile-based SAP development work management.

The SAP ACTIVATE framework, using Model Company, provides ready-to-run reference solutions for industry-specific requirements. Tricentis’ new-age tools, such as Live Compare combined with Tosca, deliver testing solutions for a seamless SAP upgrade or migration, impact analysis, and scriptless test automation.

This approach optimizes testing cost and effort while ensuring high quality and coverage. Live Compare’s continuous impact analysis and release assurance safeguard the integrity of the production release. (Please refer: Figure 1)

SAP Activate BPCA impact analysis

Journey to Self-healing Test Automation

Tosca test automation is highly resilient to changes. However, if an SAP application undergoes any changes due to technical or business requirements, it can damage automated test scripts. This is known as the half-life problem of test automation.

In this scenario, only 50-60 % of the test automation is usable with every successive release. 40-50% of it suffers damage due to alterations brought about by the SAP application’s user interface. Users cannot identify the damage until the release date, so there’s often no time to heal the test automation.

This pushes users to leverage expensive and error-prone manual testing, resulting in defective production. When LiveCompare and Tosca capabilities are combined, we can monitor the SAP QA systems and identify the impacted Tosca test automation scripts, providing testing teams with the maximum time to heal the automated test cases by re-scanning the application (See Figure 1)

Scaling and Accelerating SAP Transformation with an Integrated Solution Approach

Dealing with quality assurance challenges for SAP applications that are both highly complex and fast-changing can take much work. This often leads to increased costs associated with quality, more extended testing periods, and delayed deployment.

However, you can achieve successful large-scale SAP transformations by implementing a well-structured and interconnected tool ecosystem, as shown in (Figure 2), along with a carefully thought-out testing strategy, effective QA governance, and an integrated tool chain approach. This will reduce overall quality costs, shorter testing periods, and a faster time-to-value.

Conclusion

Early detection and efficient containment of defects are critical in substantially diminishing the deployment time for SAP releases. This, in turn, expedites the rollout and upgrades of SAP systems, culminating in meticulously crafted production environments devoid of defects. Consequently, organizations experience enhanced operational efficiency, improved customer satisfaction, and heightened competitiveness in the market landscape.

Utilizing the synergies between Cigniti and Tricentis empowers enterprises to maneuver through the intricacies of SAP testing adeptly, unleashing the full potential of their SAP investments and propelling business expansion in the digital age.

This partnership introduces a fresh and revolutionary approach to software testing, significantly expediting digital transformation, application deployment, and migration to the cloud. Embracing automation and codeless methodologies and leveraging the advantages of AI-driven intelligence epitomize the strategy of this collaboration.

Know more about Cigniti and Tricentis partnership.