Is Your SAP Testing Adequate?

Firms today are focusing on doing business faster, adopting change quicker, and giving their customers more of what they want. As these companies try to find a way to keep up with shifting market demands and alternative offerings, more and more emphasis is being put on continuous innovation. Innovation is critical to remaining competitive, even relevant, and makes products better, customers happier, and companies stronger.

However, this drive to improve what your company has to offer can put a strain on the resources required to test and validate the things you’ve changed. After all, every new feature or function that’s introduced could change an existing business process. The higher the speed and quantity of change, the greater the amount of testing required. The fact that many businesses remain stuck with old, out-of-date testing processes only compounds the problem.

Those old testing processes are typically made up of spreadsheets containing test scenarios, manual scripts for teams of testers to walk through, lists of test user IDs and passwords, tables full of test data that need to be loaded for each testing iteration, and functional leads who wait for results to interpret. Testing can take weeks, while new innovations await the verdict.

Even after testing is complete and changes are approved for import into production, test leads and managers from each functional area still hold their breath with each release. Was the testing adequate? Did we miss something? Their fears are certainly not unfounded. Most testing includes dozens of scripts that each run a handful of times, only follow by-the-book processes and only account for idealized scenarios. For a company that runs hundreds of thousands of transactions a day (or more) in their live system a handful of test scenarios will not likely cover their true daily activities.

This is where Testimony by Basis Technologies comes in. Basis Technologies looked at traditional SAP regression testing, saw the gaps in coverage, and tossed that approach out the window. Instead, we decided to start from scratch. Before we began we asked ourselves questions like:

• What is it we really want to test?
• How can we get more coverage without more effort?
• How do we guarantee our testing reflects actual production activities?
• How can we ensure that our test data mimics production data (without massive overhead)?
• How can we take away all the effort needed to create and maintain test scripts?

The way we answered these questions was to shift away from testing based on client-side interactions, and instead start using what happens on actual production servers as the basis for a test library.

Unlike traditional testing products that rely on users, managers and current process documentation to create test cases, Testimony records activities in production as they are occurring and automatically translates them into test scripts. The recorded behavior is then ‘played back’ into a copy of the production system where the latest changes have been applied, so you can see precisely how your real day-to-day production activities would be impacted by those changes.

Testimony uses the same processes observed in production, the same data, the same users running those activities, and with the same volume. If you have 2000 active users in your system, each executing hundreds of transactions per day, an extensive batch schedule, and thousands of incoming RFC and HTTP calls, all of that activity we be captured and replicated in just the same way that it was observed in production.

Results are compared in real time and regressions are aggregated for your analysts to begin looking at immediately. To top it off, all of this is done without an impact on performance – there are no agents to install on user machines, and no need to maintain a large cache of test scripts, test users, or test data. When your test plans are out of date or getting old, you simply run a new recording to create a new test library. Most importantly, this automates the majority of your testing process so that your employees can focus on business critical processes rather than testing.

As your company moves to become more agile and adopt change as quickly as it is needed, the importance of a streamlined, high coverage approach to regression testing that can produce results quickly and accurately will only grow. Testimony by Basis Technologies can get you there.