Do Test Accelerators really speed up ERP Testing?

The ERP market has grown and diversified over the years and with growing competition organizations are realizing the need to effectively implement ERP solutions. ERP solutions help organizations to manage their accounts, resources, HR activities, and even some external factors that impact the business. This makes ERP a business-critical matter, thus, ERP Testing a serious affair. Test Automation and Test Accelerators have been adding value to the Testing and automation process. When it comes to ERP testing, how good value can Test Accelerators bring for speeding up the Software Development and Testing cycle?

Why is ERP implementation important?

ERP solutions are implemented to bring down the overall operational costs and even increase the productivity. It further helps to reduce the time and efforts for managing various data sets and records. Businesses go through major transformations that might include mergers and acquisitions too, which makes management of records much more tedious. ERP helps to streamline processes and resources that are critical for organizations.

This makes management of data seamless and effective. It further helps to manage the material requirements for any business unit – buying, selling, lost, and found. This supports organizations to manage the stock and rationalize the purchase process. When implemented effectively, an ERP solution even helps businesses to estimate market trends and accordingly plan their business moves.

ERP implementation and the Role of Test Accelerators

If ERP solutions are expected to help organizations in running their business functions smoothly, then it is important to effectively implement these computerized applications. Testing and effective implement is critical, as the overall system can get much more complicated and tangled.

ERP implementation has to be result-oriented, as ultimately, it is implemented to bring down the costs and streamline various activities. It is part of a long-term business strategy for organizations, especially, to facilitate integration amongst various teams – marketing, sales, quality, purchase, customer relationship management, and so on.

Most importantly, it helps the company to work with a single software and also operate with a common database for the entire organization. Let’s say, ERP implementation has to take into account integration amongst various teams and processes, which makes the solution a ‘binding’ factor. Hence, ERP testing involves various facets of testing – Performance Testing, Functional Testing, Security Testing, Regression Testing and Integration testing.

Test Automation has been viewed as an enabler for ERP testing and implementation. The reasons are pretty evident – Speed and Quality. Automation helps to eliminate the errors in the testing process, brings speed, and creates a robust framework for future testing activities. Likewise, Test Automation Accelerators enable organizations to skip the challenges and accelerate their functional and regression testing activities.

Test Accelerators are frameworks that help teams to conduct early automation, and also develop test scripts while the development process is in motion. It also allows other business users to engage in the test automation process and add value to it. Practically, it facilitates end-to-end test automation across varying technology platforms.

Are Test Accelerators business-critical?

While all this sounds lucrative and good for the business, implementing Test Accelerators and building the right set of frameworks is an investment from a monetary as well as resource perspective. Hence, it is important to establish the exact benefits of ERP Test Accelerators in SDLC.

Enables frequent releases
Speed is critical for every business and to top it all up, there is a lot of investment when it comes to ERP implementation. Applications will have to roll out and software will have get integrated and released for use. In an Agile or a DevOps set-up, Test Automation Accelerators are needed for enabling frequent releases of applications/software and simultaneously even reduce the maintenance efforts. With automation and effective test strategy, all the quality metrics can be controlled and monitored meticulously.

Early automation and faster time-to-market
Accelerators can work simultaneously along with the other testing and development activities. Hence, automation can be implemented right from the inception of the development activities. Early automation not only helps in detecting issues much in time, but also to achieve faster time-to-market. This helps to bring down the development and testing costs, and increase the overall ROI on the business initiatives.

Not need to build frameworks from scratch
When you use pre-built Accelerators, you don’t have to develop an automation test suite from scratch. Accelerators help you to generate automated scripts once the test cases are documented and a logical flow is defined. You can almost cut down on 30% of you testing efforts with Automation Accelerators. Moreover, you can even conduct offline automation on the application under test. This cuts down your licensing costs.

Offers an end-to-end automation framework
Accelerators provide you with scalable automation frameworks that can be used across various technology platforms for end-to-end testing activities. This ensures faster RoI, easy to use set-up, and robust testing strategy for various applications and solutions. It further helps in reducing the overall development costs, as everything can be managed within a single framework.

ERP implementation and ERP testing poses numerous challenges for organizations and IT teams. Firstly, teams have to deal with complex technology, they need extensive testing experience, involves integration testing of multiple applications, raises performance issues, and even regulatory compliance issues. This brings down the speed of testing and implementation, incurring losses for the organization.

Test Accelerators help to automate various recurring activities and support the testing and development tasks. This not only accelerates processes, but also makes ERP testing cost-effective and quality assured. What’s your take on this topic? Do leave your comments on this post.

Connect with us to leverage Cigniti’s ERP CoE suite with a repository of customized pre-built test accelerators for 3000+ manual test cases, 2000+ automated test scripts, well-defined test data management processes, and robust test automation frameworks for leading ERP platforms.