Tester’s choice – from Order Takers to Rain Makers

Around 10-12 years ago, when independent testing roles started to gain popularity, thanks to the adoption of WWW, things were different. Customers were looking at us to execute test cases (many a time written by them) and report anomalies, expecting …

SAP Test Automation – Solution Approaches

If any transaction flow changes or additional fields are included, functional consultants can easily make those changes in spreadsheets or GUI input. The involvement of automation engineers is reduced since the keyword codes once developed would not change across the SAP screens since the technology used to develop them is the same.

SAP Test Automation – Solution Approaches

Keywords can be implemented in different ways. Usually, keywords are implemented at business function or transaction level. For e.g., “CreateSalesOrder” or “VA01” can be a keyword with associated parameters like order type, sales org etc. Similarly ReleaseSalesOrder can be another keyword with its input fields as associated input parameters.VA01, ReleaseSalesOrder and other transactional keywords can be organized in the appropriate flow to automate a business process like “Order to Cash”.

SAP Test Automation – Challenges

Test Automation is often done by engineers who are well versed with programming concepts and automation techniques, but not with business processes. The ideal situation would be business analysts or functional consultants automating the test process flows, but unfortunately, they do not have automation experience. Also, in SAP testing teams, automation engineers are usually not many in number and they are shared across projects, because of which the rate of automation and coverage is low.

SAP Test Automation – Challenges and Solutions

Many times SAP testing cycles get shortened or reduced due to release pressures even though testing is business critical. We often run the risk of low test coverage due to unavailability of bandwidth.

As per the 2008 Panorama ERP reports, the cost of testing activities is between 30-45% of a global SAP deployment project and around 80% of a migration project. Also, around 93% of the ERP projects are extended and only 35% are within budget