Undoubtedly, SAP is a great enterprise application that helps you manage your critical business processes. Migration to S/4HANA from SAP ECC is only the first step of your digital transformation journey. Migration from ECC to S/4HANA offers several benefits such as simplified data handling, improved workflows, larger transaction volumes and real-time analytics. Saying otherwise, S/4HANA provides your more capabilities by improving collaboration and accelerating database queries processing. Although the benefits of migration or implementation of S/4HANA are numerous, there are some alarming statistics. ERP implementation has a poor reputation of getting over-timed and over-budget. Another is resistance from business users. The only answer to address these problems is testing.
SAP testing not only helps in keeping control on the implementation timelines and budgets but also it helps in handling change management. However, if you opt for manual testing, you're not going to achieve your digital transformation initiatives timely. This is where SAP test automation comes in.
Why test automation for SAP?
- Speed up testing: In this era of agile and devops, dev teams are rolling out new features faster than ever. To ensure business continuity, whenever an update is rolled out, you need to execute regression tests. However, to keep up with the speed of development, you need to invest in testing automation.
- Manual testing is error prone and doesn’t promise adequate coverage. Test automation ensures that all the business processes under risk are adequately covered to avoid business disruption.
- Business users are the most essential part of the testing process since they are ones who need to operate the ERP to fulfill their routine tasks. However, their availability for testing is a big challenge. Automation tools supports them by automating repetitive tasks.
Barriers to SAP test automation
If we talk about test automation, nobody can deny its benefits. It speeds up the testing process, brings transparency, and helps in speeding up the implementation process. However, when it comes to SAP automation testing, decision makers often hesitate to implement automation. Some of the reasons for this are listed below:- Low confidence in risk coverage: In this digitally enabled world, software quality is of paramount importance. A poor quality software not only impacts user experience but in the long run defects only get more expensive in terms of downtime(s), labor intensiveness, and reputation damage. With respect to automated testing, automation test coverage is defined as the percentage of test coverage achieved by automated testing, as compared to manual testing. According to SAP Insider, available test automation platforms only offer 30-40% of coverage and they still need to employ manual testers.
- Finding the right skill set: Most of the available test automation platforms are code based. To ensure adequate coverage, you need to incorporate business users. Since business users are non-technical folks, they find it challenging to operate test automation platforms.
- High maintenance: SAP is a highly dynamic application. Decision makers often hesitate to implement test automation because of the involvement of high test script maintenance effort. The main merit of test automation is that it makes testing effortless. If you need to put effort in maintenance, you’ll end up losing all the benefits achieved from automation.
- End-to-end coverage: Often organizations integrate their SAP instance with other enterprise applications. However, finding the test automation platform that supports your entire technology stack is a challenging task.
Addressing challenges in SAP test automation
If you follow our tips, you can easily overcome the above mentioned challenges.
- Zero code automation: You should bring in a no code test automation platform that can easily be used by non-technical folks. One such platform is Opkey. It is a no code test automation platform that doesn’t require any coding knowledge to operate. Its SAP specific recorder and intuitive drag-drop interface make it easy to create test cases.
- Self-healing capabilities: Always opt for a test automation platform that can detect changes in the test scripts and heals them automatically so that QA teams don’t need to put effort in maintenance.
- End-to-end coverage: Opt for a test automation platform that offers end-to-end coverage. This helps in automating tests across the entire technology stack.
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