Analyze Risk and Ensure Quality

When adopting an on-demand, continuous delivery pipeline in a complex software application like SAP, with many highly interconnected and interdependent parts, effective dependency management is critical.

ActiveControl’s Deep Impact Analysis solves the problem of technical dependencies by creating a repository of your SAP object relationships – standard and custom – which it uses to analyze the impact of every change on every dependent object. If you’re attempting to approve or deploy a change that relies on other changes that are yet to be delivered, ActiveControl will let you know that you may be about to cause a problem in the target system. Analyzers like Deep Impact Analysis can even be run automatically as part of a control gate before change approvals are requested.

Deep Impact Analysis supports ActiveControl’s dynamic backlog management feature, automatically highlighting any potential issues should changes be re-prioritized and re-sequenced.

Test Impact Radar’s powerful impact analysis allows you to understand the full implications of each change to your SAP systems. It identifies SAP transactions affected by all of the objects in all of your release transports, then scans your test scripts and relates the two. Affected transactions are cross-referenced against production system usage statistics, providing insight into the relative importance of each test. Test Impact Radar even identifies and highlights impacted functionality that is not covered by the uploaded test scripts, showing where new ones may be needed. The outcome is a snapshot-like impact assessment that helps your testers to create efficient, prioritized test plans and keeps your business stakeholders in the loop.

Test Impact Radar allows you to understand your current test impact position for every change across your SAP landscape. Real-time snapshots can be produced for any project at any time. That means you can even use Test Impact Radar to keep business people abreast of transactions and business processes that will be impacted by your release, based on the technical objects within them.

Some transports contain critical or risky objects. Others might contain changes to objects that should never have been touched at all (certain configuration templates, for example). The trouble is, you don’t know which ones are which without manually checking the contents.

RiskGuard can be configured to flag risky transports and changes during both development and approval and can control subsequent actions based on the level of risk identified. This ensures that the right people always see the things that need review.

DevEnforcer is an integrated code inspector that makes sure developers adhere to consistent coding and naming standards. It also runs proactive analyzers that identify potential code performance and security problems.

DevEnforcer analyzes the contents of every SAP transport to ensure that every code change is made to the same level of quality. Ensuring that SAP developers all work to identical standards is potentially a huge time- and money-saver, especially across large projects with distributed teams of in-house, outsourced and contract staff. 

What if, instead of finding development issues close to go-live, you could save time and money by identifying them early in the SAP development lifecycle? This concept of ‘shifting left’ is a core part of the DevOps philosophy supported by ActiveControl; it’s why we’ve created more than seventy out-of-the-box analyzers and made the analysis framework extensible to suit the needs of each individual business.

ActiveControl enables important checks to be performed at every step during SAP development, from technical issues like transport releasability or locked import queues, to intelligent comparisons like approval date checks or previous import error checks. If you can find a problem by manual means close to go-live, ActiveControl can find it early in your development cycle. Automatically.