Key Challenges with Test Automation over SAP ECC and S/4 HANA
I have been talking about this subject quite a lot recently with both customers and prospective customers. During these discussions certain fundamental points that have come to light.
It's no just about SAP.
None of the organizations I spoke with were concerned solely with SAP. They all had a collection of applications and systems that work together. Test automation must embrace the wider application landscape. SAP is not an island and business processes will traverse multiple integrated applications.
This often involves different groups of people as well as different technologies, presenting both an organizational and a technical challenge. Customers explained how they used our management solution, Qualify, to organize tasks, tests and results across the groups and were able to pull this all together for analysis and decision-making purposes. Furthermore, where they have built test automation across multiple systems the validation of those connections was of immense value.
Getting the right team.
Legacy automation tools require programming skills which forms a barrier to those with the business knowledge. Productivity can be so much greater if non-technical users, strong in business and testing experience are aided by a code-free test automation solution.
Regression testing - moving the goalposts.
Finally – In most cases, the main goal was regression testing which led to thinking about what that means, and what value it brings. Among the prospective customers, the focus was on how to determine what to test for, and of course, this is incredibly difficult. You would like to test absolutely everything, but that’s impossible with traditional testing tools. However, among the clients using our test automation solution, TestDrive, this was simply not an issue. They had moved the goalposts by getting TestDrive to tell them about any meaningful difference from the last (live) release. Simply, “What’s different?”. That is very easy to achieve in TestDrive as it captures everything and can hence advise what’s new, different, or missing. If you know this for a new release candidate, nothing will catch you out. It also coincidentally makes maintenance very easy, in fact practically non-existent. If you want to know why ask me.
George Wilson, SVP/Operations Director at Original Software