10 SAP Testing Building Blocks to Deliver Transformation Success

Quality assurance is the number 1 enabler to deliver sustainable business change when it comes to the successful delivery of SAP transformation programs. Yet in the second State of Worldwide Business Assurance for SAP solutions research – conducted by Sogeti, Tricentis, Int4, and Capgemini – it reveals that many organizations lack a targeted plan, or the dedicated budget and resources for this purpose.

Of the 501 organizations surveyed, 40.9% primarily rely on their IT teams to ensure the quality of business assurance processes for SAP solutions, while only 27.3% have dedicated testing teams. So as the SAP landscape becomes more intricate, there is a rising need for expert guidance, resulting in increased reliance on specialized service providers who possess extensive knowledge of SAP systems, processes, technologies and testing methodologies. To help you on your SAP journey, we’ve set out 10 continuous testing building blocks to help leverage the successful delivery of your SAP programs:

#1 Global testing strategy

For the very largest SAP transformations, implementing a global test strategy is the critical success factor, encompassing all aspects of the program, including performance, security, accessibility, mobile, shift-left and shift-right testing approaches, and sustainability. Templating the test strategy can help automate the roll-out using different deployment strategies across the global network. Our frameworks like TMap® and TPI® are considered de-facto industry standards to build and implement successful global testing strategies.

#2 ALM tool driven test management & integrated tools framework

Tool driven test orchestration – like SAP Cloud ALM and SAP Solman – will introduce rigor and structure to your quality assurance. Traceability, test planning, test execution (both manual and automated), defect management, and E2E test analytics will improve overall testing efficiency, helping organizations to realize up to 50% savings in overall testing TCO.

#3 Evolution of AI-powered testing platforms

As AI-powered intelligent testing automation platforms – like Tricentis TOSCA – continue to evolve, they help to establish a strong foundation for continuous testing across SAP landscapes. These platforms provide higher reusability, scalability and resilience to optimize automation maintenance spend, enabling up to 70% of automation coverage. Ultimately, this can help reduce 30-40% of test execution cycles, accelerating release while de-risking SAP S/4HANA transformations.  

#4 In-sprint test automation

According to our research, Waterfall remains the most popular implementation and development methodology for SAP, accounting for 50.1% of the total share. But agile and DevOps are gaining huge momentum, especially for SAP RISE transformations. In-sprint automation is an approach to automate the testing of business requirements within the same sprint in which they have been developed, thus, leaving no automation backlog. This shift-left testing approach helps to improve automation coverage and consistency in quality assurance.

#5 Integration testing

In order to overcome integration challenges between SAP and non-SAP applications, 48.5% of survey respondents said that they simulate third-party systems, and B2B partners to separate SAP testing from third-party systems. Meanwhile, 54.5% of surveyed organizations are using automated API testing solutions to mitigate the risk of integration testing.  Service virtualization solutions – like Int4’s IFTT – simulates 3rd party systems enabling >20% faster time-to-market for integration testing.

#6 Automated performance testing

Slow is the new downtime. To ensure application performance, tools like Tricentis Neoload provides codeless, automated performance testing that keeps pace with volume, velocity and variety. With continuous performance testing, a 90% reduction in performance issues in the production system can be achieved. Performance testing is the most prevalent use case for specialized testing service providers, with 55.7% of our respondents utilizing their services for this purpose.

#7 AI-driven change impact analysis for risk based testing

Commercial AI-driven tools – like Tricentis LiveCompare – provide smart, change impact analytics and insights that help significantly reduce risk, time and cost of delivery. LiveCompare tells you exactly what needs to be tested by analyzing change impact of custom codes, interfaces, processes, security and roles. Such tools help to prioritize where to spend time, money and resource, avoiding over testing, while preventing under testing to deliver a high quality release with zero defects. This can reduce the risks of potential business disruption caused from SAP changes by more than 90% while contributing ~30% savings in regression testing.

#8 Intelligent test data management

Managing test data is one of the most time consuming and resource intensive challenges, and can result in slowing down testing and agile delivery. Provisioning sensitive AI-driven test data with data masking that is 100% GDPR compliant will help to generate realistic, high quality results. SAP Boost test accelerator suite provides multiple tools like STDE test data extractor, and ADA (Artificial Data Amplifier). While Tricentis TDM accelerates test data provisioning.

#9 Cognitive QA for intelligent insights

Cognitive QA is an AI-driven analytics tool which provides a holistic, 360° end-to-end view of quality assurance processes, to enable better decision-making. Intelligent insights are provided through descriptive, prescriptive and predictive analytics​ on what to automate, what to test, when to stop testing, duplicate test efforts and sentiment analysis build the foundation for continuous testing improvement.

#10 Generative AI impact on SAP continuous testing

The possibility for generative AI to revolutionize quality assurance is significant, and a likely game-changer for autonomous quality assurance. Potential benefits include a significant reduction in manual labor, an increase in test coverage and consistency in quality by continuously learning and improving. However, this is a new and fast-evolving space, so it is also crucial to understand the potential pitfalls of generative AI like irrelevant testing, dependency on trained quality data, and interpreting AI generative tests.

Find out more…

The State of Worldwide Business Assurance for SAP solutions – 2023 report aims to inspire you and your teams to develop an efficient and effective validation process for SAP implementation, transformation and testing. This in-depth assessment of the SAP environment provides a clear view of the developments and changes that are taking place currently, and are likely to continue in future. To help benchmark your own preparedness, including what measures can be taken to overcome integration challenges, download the report now.

Or if you’d like to discuss your specific quality assurance challenges, then get in touch today. At Sogeti, we help many customers on their quality assurance journey, building the business case while defining business quality value realization strategy. Our smart assessment framework utilizes an ‘outside-in view’ which helps organizations to assess their quality assurance maturity process and benchmark against industry peers to identify and recommend areas for improvement.