accelerating sap testing - sandhata€¦ · the test data. one of the most common concerns raised...

Accelerating SAP Testing

sandhata.comFor more information please contact us on: +44 20 3300 1633

Technical Paper

Transform the Business of IT

Time to innovate smart testing techniques

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Today, companies increasingly require faster and more frequent software delivery at a reduced cost in order to remain commercially viable and stay ahead of their competitors. SAP customers with the same business drivers are facing more pressure, as they would typically manage to hit up to three releases in one year, with soaring testing costs of up to 70 percent of the project budget. SAP testing is largely manual and is most likely to be the bottleneck that hinders business agility.

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Contents

Executive summaryThe challenges of SAP testingWhat makes SAP testing more challenging?Typical SAP customer requirementsThe solutionExampleAbout Sandhata

Technical Paper: Accelerating SAP Testing

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Executive SummaryWe are in the midst of a global IT revolution where the speed of change plays a critical part in achieving many of the business drivers on the organisational agenda. In the SAP world, speed of delivery has been a major challenge for many reasons. One of the most common issues is the delay in SAP testing. Although manual testing has been accepted widely in the SAP world, CIOs are under pressure to reduce costs while remaining aligned with business objectives. This has sparked test automation and service virtualization initiatives, which help to enable early testing in SAP organisations. However, test automation for SAP is a unique process that presents specific technical challenges when it comes to execution. This requires the team to not only include traditional testers who can provide the domain expertise, but also involve specialists who have an in-depth SAP experience and testing background.

The Challenges in the SAP TestingMany organisations with large and complex SAP system landscapes display the same patterns of issues and challenges with SAP testing. For some, the cost of testing can rise to almost 70 percent of the entire project value.

All formal SAP testing begins from the presentation layer, which is a practice that causes a wide range of issues, such as:

Creating awareness of the challenges in SAP testing world.

How to leverage test automation and service virtualization to accelerate delivery in SAP landscape.

Common Problems and solutions

About Sandhata’s capability in providing SAP testing and service virtualization solutions.

Case studies


There would typically be an increased number of production incidents, as well as project delays due to issues appearing late in the SDLC. Not only do teams struggle to achieve business agility with traditional testing but there would typically also be issues with low morale and confidence within the development and testing communities.

What makes SAP testing more challenging? Most SAP environments are complex and heterogeneous, with legacy applications and complex legacy message formats and protocols such as ECC, RFC/BAPI and IDOC. SAP middleware PI and XI mapping/routing scenarios typically span many different technologies, for example HTTP, IDOC, JDBC, File, EDI and web services. End-to-end scenarios typically span multiple business units and often extend out to external business partners, which increases the waiting time.

Although there are many tools available in the DevOps spectrum which enable early testing, and using service virtualization can reduce dependencies, there is a great deal of customisation and tailored adaption of the tool and technology required when it comes to SAP landscapes.

A successful testing implementation will require skilled resources with a high level of SAP technical knowledge.

Examples of general issues in implementing test automation in the SAP system landscape include:


Less visibility of technical flow and integration, which takes longer to investigate

The testing is still largely manual, with a dependency on the entire system being in place

Testing is often too late to be effective

Business users are required to conduct testing and drive realistic test data

Test cycles are few and far between due to resource and time constraints

Most organisations accept that their testing is inadequate

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As test automation is mostly at the presentation layer, some organisations may be reluctant to invest further in integration test automation or service virtualization after gaining low ROI from initial, large-scale investment.

Many IT companies fail to take an integrated approach and implement test strategy at enterprise level. This results in ineffective and isolated teams with various formal and informal tools and procedures.

Some organisations choose to have multiple end-to-end test environments to resolve the delays in testing but soon realise that the overhead maintenance costs are not sustainable.

Senior stakeholders are not buying into the concept of increased investment for better ROI for SAP testing, even though this would enable a modern approach and continuous testing. This makes it difficult for influencers and DevOps evangelists to push the testing modernisation ideas within their organisations.

In some cases, there are enterprise-wide initiatives taken to introduce test automation and service virtualization, but a lack of appropriate change management causes confusion in the development community – resulting in delays in implementing the technology.

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There is a wide range of challenges that SAP customers face. Some of these involve the growing infrastructural cost of the test environment, which often has too many functional testing cycles at different levels.

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Examples of technical hurdles and challenges include:



Configuring the consumer proxy by creating a logical port (or editing an existing one) to route traffic via proxy. This is a big challenge initially, however, once successfully implemented for one service, it can be replicated for the remaining services that use SAP SOA MANAGER.

Establishing SSL communication in SOA MANAGER. This is complex during configuration, as certificates need to be uploaded to STRUST by the SAP Basis team and the SM59 destination needs to be configured to use the certificate uploaded in SRUST.

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Typical SAP customer requirementsCustomers want to improve the quality of testing without increasing the cost of technology, infrastructure and operations. Many customers have historically spent large amounts of money on quality control and preventing production incidents.

In this third era of IT, organisations are interested in new ideas and technology that can improve quality without increasing the testing cost in the long term. They look for a testing tool that does not require complex programming and gives quicker turnaround with built-in SAP-specific features. Many IT departments are familiar with traditional testing tools that need a large amount of scripting, which increases maintenance overheads. These days, a lightweight testing tool with minimum scripting is one of the top requirements during POCs.

Customers are keen to know if service virtualization in an SAP landscape can reduce test environment set-up costs and dependencies on other legacy systems such as mainframes. Although many organisations have embarked on SV programmes, it is still early days for many SAP customers. When a customer has seen inadequate testing tool implementations in the past, they tend to be doubtful about service virtualization in the complex SAP landscape.

Customers want to know if the tool can create virtual services fast enough to enable testing within agile sprints. Agile testing requires quick turnaround of test cases and the ability to enable testing of development objects and application components in isolation before being integrated. SAP organisations wanting to adopt agile and lean practices are aware that one of their biggest challenges is to establish the right testing techniques, tools and methodology to support agile.

The customers need the capability to easily maintain and manage the various versions of the virtual services across environments. Commonly, the SAP applications are connected to other non-SAP and SAP applications via service layers such as ESB and the service library is maintained as a key asset. One important thing in SV implementation is to consider the version control and the maintenance of the virtual service library and their alignment to the original services.

Most SAP customers want the testing tool and SV capability that can help early performance testing. Performance testing is becoming increasingly important in the SAP world. Performance testing strategies are becoming increasingly important, as they help to avoid expensive design-level changes later in the SDLC. Customers are looking for tools that enable them to shift left the execution of their key components performance testing.

They are looking for automated validation of transformation, enrichment and routing logic in the SAP middleware components. SAP middleware applications are key components and, in many projects, represent up to 90 percent of the changes. Hence, it is important to be able to test the SAP middleware early in the project, in isolation, without needing to set up the end-to-end integrated landscape.

Customers want to know the ability of the testing and SV tools when it comes to generating and maintaining the test data. One of the most common concerns raised by SAP customers revolves around SAP test data generation and its maintenance. SAP data formats are often complex and large, whereas test data generation activity in traditional testing is mostly repetitive and time-consuming.


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The SolutionIn order to effectively test the SAP applications, the following key issues need to be addressed:



1. Remove the limitations to early testing Generally, the SAP development streams are dependent on an integrated environment to perform some meaningful testing, even on unit or component level. A minimal amount of manual testing or semi-automated testing is typically done on an ad-hoc basis. This is one of the primary causes of the increased number of defects in the integration test cycles, which results in multiple testing cycles. The other limitation is the dependency on the synchronous responses that are expected from the integrating components, which are generally not present during the development stage.

SolutionIn a system landscape, there are typically many SAP components such as SAP Portal/GUI, SAP CRM, SAP ERP, SAP Banking Services, SAP FCM, as well as SAP middleware components such as SAP PI, XI. To enable the individual development streams to do more meaningful, automated testing during the development phase, it is important to have a suitable automation testing tool and a service virtualization tool. The testing tools that trigger and validate tests using the messaging layer or transports should be considered. These tools can help with testing the component in isolation without relying on the GUI and fully integrated system. Once the required technical set-up is done, the turnaround time of the test cases is significantly less. Although the testing solution is common to all technologies, SAP systems are more complex with transport protocols and messaging formats. This is why it is important to consider setting up a core team with SAP expertise as well as experience within the integration tool.

Service virtualization is another technical enabler that can help to remove the dependencies in testing. SV tools simulate the behaviour of the services that send the responses back to the SAP system under test. These tools can also simulate databases and non-functional aspects such as frequency or response time of the services. This technology is very powerful when combined with the appropriate level of automation testing.

2. Reduce the test environment and test set-up overheadsMany organisations want to reduce their spending on expensive SAP test environments and their maintenance, without affecting the frequency and quality of the deliverables. Although there is not much that can be done about the necessity of the end-to-end integrated test environments for the later stages of testing, there is plenty more that can be addressed to enable effective early testing with non-integrated environments in the early phases. With an appropriate test strategy and technical enablement, it is possible to deliver good quality software into production with just one or two fully integrated test environments.

SolutionSAP middleware, SAP GUI and back-end applications can be tested in isolation with appropriate testing tools and service virtualization capabilities.

3. Reduce the amount of manual testingOne common limitation we come across in many organisations with SAP systems is that testing is largely manual. Even if there are some test automation capabilities, they are very much limited in coverage and mainly for end-to-end testing. This is due to the fact that organisations found traditional test automation to be expensive, time-consuming and high maintenance within the highly complex and tailored SAP landscape. This results in diminishing value for investment over a period of time.

SolutionIt is important to define an appropriate automation test strategy and a roadmap that offers quick wins, as well as helps to achieve the desired level of automation over a period of time. Test automation should be considered at all levels of testing, starting with unit testing. In some organisations, any form of formal testing is done only in the integrated environments on SIT level, which causes several test cycles and expensive defect fixes.


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The SolutionContinued...



4. Lack of process and methodologiesAlthough the technology enablement is key for test automation, the benefits of the automation cannot be realised without a process framework tailored for the needs of the organisation. The defined process framework should provide the best practices and standards required to deliver a robust test automation methodology to enable a smooth adoption of the new tool and technology, as well as a process to monitor and maintain the standards to avoid any technical debts.

SolutionThe organisation should consider engaging industry experts to define the test automation strategy, implement the tools, enable the technology and train the teams. Although this increases the initial investment, a well-planned implementation and enablement with dedicated experts will reduce cost in the long run by avoiding badly designed test automation frameworks and incorrect strategies. A well laid out strategy also increases the reusability within the business.

ExampleIf we wanted to test the SAP middleware system PI or an integrated SAP system – without depending on the other non-SAP systems – service virtualization can simulate the behaviour of the systems, or more specifically any responses received from these systems within a specific transfer.

Virtual services simulate the behaviour of an entire application or system during testing. They can run from any infrastructure or cloud, simulating a real-time network model or security zones in operation. Each developer or tester can easily have their own test environment, and using service virtualization doesn’t impact the choice of testing tools or the method of testing. Developers and testers continue to use their testing tools or carry out manual testing.


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About SandhataSandhata’s experience in SAP technology and in-depth understanding of how RTW works in the SAP landscape has helped our clients to reduce their environmental dependencies. We have successfully industrialised SAP software delivery by introducing component and integration testing.



One step ahead Our in-house Sandhata facility allows us to stay ahead of SAP upgrades and its impact on test automation. Sandhata has:


A certified RTW on behalf of IBM as a SAP-Certified Solution.

A detailed understanding of the bottlenecks, complexities and pain points in SAP testing.

A Centre of Excellence in SAP testing and service virtualization that helps us to provide these services for our clients successfully in complex environments.

Service offerings providing our clients with both the tactical and strategic options to implement SAP testing.

Processes and methodologies that not only offer the best practices relevant to RTW but also provide a framework for a successful and scalable implementation.

Experience is keyOur Experience in adding value to SAP testing

Improving quality

Lowering continual testing costs

Lowering test lab costs

Reducing reliance on application owners during testing of XI/PI

Improving collaboration and efficiency between developers and testers

Supporting the move to a more agile development

Enabling testing earlier – at component/interface layer

Virtualizing end systems to remove dependencies, such as stub web services and application servers

Observing events to accelerate defect investigation in the end-to-end system for grey box testing

Enabling quicker and frequent regression testing

For more information please contact us on: +44 20 3300 1633

sandhata.com

We Transform the Business of IT

http://zero2ten.com

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accelerating sap testing - sandhata€¦ · the test data. one of the most common concerns raised...

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