Announcing Testimony, a new approach to SAP testing with Robotic Test Automation
Testimony allows comprehensive SAP regression testing to begin in days. Test cases are created, executed and maintained automatically.
After a very hectic few months I’m hugely excited to be able to share the news of the latest addition to our product range. Today we have officially announced a genuinely transformative new solution called Testimony, which totally reinvents regression testing in SAP environments.
We all know that SAP systems need to constantly evolve to support your business. Most of us are also aware that in general it’s difficult, maybe even impossible, to be confident changes won’t have some sort of unexpected impact. And unexpected usually means negative.
So how do we try to mitigate that risk and ensure key business processes aren’t negatively impacted in ways we didn’t expect? Well, we all do comprehensive regression testing before we deploy any changes, right?
If only it was that simple!
In reality, while regression testing protects your business processes, making it happen is not straightforward. Traditional approaches are slow, disruptive, and expensive, and often still don’t deliver the coverage that’s really needed. One of our customers recently described their current approach as ‘flying by the seat of their pants’, which sums things up nicely. That makes it hard to keep critical processes safe on a day-to-day basis, let alone during major projects like re-platforming in the cloud.
At Basis Technologies we realized that traditional test automation tools simply aren’t solving this problem well enough, so - given that SAP automation tools are our reason for getting up in the morning - so we set ourselves to the task of automating not only test execution, but also creation and upkeep, in a way that removes the need for a big investment in human capital.
Testimony is the outcome.
It uses a new concept called Robotic Test Automation (RTA), which provides the ability to start running comprehensive regression testing from scratch in only a matter of days. This new technology completely changes the game by automating the test generation as well as test execution.
The result is that we can often achieve better than 80% test coverage in SAP without writing a single test!
A unique new approach
When we designed Testimony, we first looked at why existing testing solutions (both manual and automated) don’t do a good enough job of solving the regression problem.
What we heard time and again from the firms we work with was that the current barrier to entry is too high, as is the subsequent cost of effective maintenance - it’s simply too much work to understand what to test, create the tests, and then maintain them as coverage and functionality increase. There was also a strong desire to minimize the impact on functional business users, who in many cases today have to be far too involved in testing.
So we asked ourselves, what could a successful testing model look like if requirements, discovery, planning and maintenance could all effectively be eliminated?
Well to us it looks like a solution that removes the limited focus of desktop-based user recordings. A solution that goes beyond the UI to capture far more of what is happening in the system. One in which the test library always reflects current business practice, because it’s re-created and automatically grows to include new functionality after every release.
Testimony achieves all this by employing a unique server-side approach to learning what to test and how to test it in SAP. It observes users as they do their jobs normally, but also discovers system level interactions that are never observed with typical UI automation tools.
This new approach eliminates the need for test data management and cleverly crafted test scripts, and allows actual end user behavior, including cross-actor business processes, to be validated. Testing coverage includes system interactions like RFCs and BAPIs, providing a much more robust level of validation than typical UI-based testing. What’s more, external system dependencies are automatically virtualized. That means external interactions can be regression tested effectively, even without the relevant external systems in your test environment.
So what does this mean?
Testimony is effective because it uses the regular activity of the entire enterprise to define testing requirements. Instead of asking questions and authoring tests or scripts, our solution produces the answer outright giving much greater confidence in change or project delivery.
It extracts a significant amount of time from the test cycle, both in development and in ongoing upkeep. That time has real value, and it’s in the acceleration of the overall delivery cycle. That could mean delivering change three times a year instead of two. It could mean having the confidence to do it every week. It could mean drastically shortening the implementation timeline for a major project. Whatever the case, what is that chance to deliver more change to production worth to you?
This new approach brings many benefits and is already changing the way that companies think about testing SAP applications. It’s giving companies a way to massively increase the speed and effectiveness of testing, so that they can deliver the changes that the business needs with much greater confidence.
Click here to find out more about how Testimony can transform your SAP test processes.
