Basis Technologies announces Testimony, reinventing testing in SAP environments with Robotic Test Automation

Testimony employs Robotic Test Automation (RTA), a fully automated new approach that eliminates cost and effort from both automated and manual testing.  

London / Dallas — Basis Technologies, a leading innovator in DevOps for SAP, today announces the expansion of its DevOps Toolset with Testimony, a solution that offers a radical new approach to functional regression testing of SAP environments.  

Testimony introduces a transformative new testing paradigm, Robotic Test Automation (RTA). RTA reduces the risk of change and gives businesses the confidence needed to operate at a highly competitive pace.  It protects critical business processes from unintended consequences of change by dramatically reducing the time needed for regression testing, while simultaneously increasing test coverage and decreasing costs.  Testimony automatically learns and validates system operation, allowing testing to ‘shift left’ to much earlier in the development cycle, without external system dependencies.  

A transformative new approach to test automation
Testimony uses RTA to deliver a fully automated solution that learns how an SAP system is used, and the way it interacts with others.  It autonomously creates a comprehensive regression library, removing the need for expensive, time-consuming tasks such as end-user recording, business process discovery, and test script creation and maintenance that are typically required by other automated solutions. Using Testimony, system-wide regression testing can now be initiated in a matter of days, with no manual intervention and far deeper business process coverage.

RTA  eliminates the challenges and expense of traditional test automation and provides a highly efficient alternative to slow, costly manual methods.  Testing becomes truly automated, from creation of test assets, to execution and upkeep. This new approach also frees up valuable functional experts to be focused on core activities rather than supporting regression testing, and removes the challenging test data problems common to traditional approaches.

Testimony provides the means to make agile development and DevOps for SAP even more effective, supporting continuous testing and faster, more frequent delivery of change. Transformation projects such as the move to SAP HANA databases or re-platforming to the cloud can be significantly accelerated, while essential SAP updates and upgrades become quicker and safer.  

Far deeper coverage
Coverage beyond the user interface (UI) is essential for effective testing, but is typically not available in SAP regression test solutions - today’s products focus only on “outside-in” interactions at the UI layer. Testimony delivers the additional insight required. It validates UI interactions but also monitors SAP software at a code-and-system level, exercising a wide variety of execution paths and technical interactions (such as remote function calls and BAPIs) and automatically including them in the overall test plan to ensure far greater coverage.

In addition, Testimony uses service virtualization to automatically isolate SAP systems from others (whether SAP or non-SAP), providing the means to fully test business processes that involve external interactions and integrations.  Representative system inputs and outputs are invoked without the need for inaccurate estimation, modelling or replication of external systems in the test environment.

Responding to user demand
66%¹ of organizations using SAP software expect regression testing to increase in the short term, and require a cost-efficient way to address the issue.  Testimony delivers a compelling new solution.

“Testimony really is revolutionary,” said Gavin Thornton, IT Senior Application SME – SAP, CBH Group².  “We were one of the first to use the product and the output immediately challenged what we thought we knew about the impact of change in our systems.  It has already fundamentally altered the way we think about testing SAP software. We’ve evaluated automated testing tools before but until now none of them have successfully addressed our basic challenges. Testimony is different. It gives us a way to massively increase the speed and effectiveness of testing, so that we can deliver the changes that the business needs with much greater confidence.”

“Our customers led us to Testimony,” adds Craig Oliver, CIO, Basis Technologies.  “Manual regression testing is common, though still beyond the reach of many organizations, but users also told us existing automation solutions are impractical and even ineffective.  Testimony is a radical solution that addresses prohibitive set-up costs and lead times, and provides a sustainable solution when effective maintenance is otherwise impossible.  What’s more, it helps to support the agile and DevOps approaches that are becoming important to an increasing number of our customers.”

Key capabilities of Testimony:

* Automatically learn how SAP systems operate, with no user intervention
* Automatically validate learned behaviour in test environments
* Shift regression testing left in the development lifecycle
* Start testing within days
* Comprehensive system coverage, beyond the UI (RFCs, batch jobs, etc)
* Test cross-system interactions without need for external systems
* Provide real-time feedback on test status

“Businesses today need to change and improve their SAP systems faster than ever thanks to digital transformation, new technology and increasing customer expectations,” continues Martin Metcalf, CEO of Basis Technologies. “However, the cost and effort involved in traditional regression testing means that most firms can’t carry out enough to be confident that critical business processes are safe, even when using older test automation tools. Testimony’s pioneering use of Robotic Test Automation totally changes the game, allowing businesses to become more agile, efficient and competitive.”

Testimony is available now. To find out more, visit www.basistechnologies.com/products/testimony.

1 Basis Technologies survey of 300 companies using SAP

2 Established in Western Australia in 1933, CBH Group is Australia’s largest co-operative and a leader in the Australian grain industry, with operations extending along the supply chain from storage, handling and transport to marketing, shipping and processing.  Owned and controlled by around 4,200 Western Australian grain growers and headquartered in Perth, Western Australia, CBH is Australia’s largest exporter of grain, with a market share of approximately 30 per cent of aggregated bulk exports.