How Manual SAP Testing Falls Short— and What You Can Do About It

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Today’s IT teams are expected to drive enterprise-class digital transformation initiatives. However, that’s proving an issue for many—particularly as the extended nature of today’s end-to-end business processes means that even the smallest software application changes can have a disrupting impact on extended SAP processes. As organizations transform their business operating models, they’re increasingly having to deal with the fact that the traditional manual software testing approaches that they have always trusted simply don’t have enough bandwidth or capability to meet the new business expectations Resource issues invariably mean that manual software testing can take weeks to complete, making it almost impossible for IT teams to be as responsive and innovative as they need to be. Additionally, traditional, non-automated testing regimes simply aren’t equipped to keep up with the accelerated pace of digital transformation—particularly for those business processes enabled by SAP innovations such as SAP S/4HANA and SAP Fiori 2.0.

How manual testing places projects at risk

There are a number of ways that manual testing makes it hard to satisfy modern SAP enterprise IT requirements…

Software delivery bottlenecks Delays in testing processes mean that there’s increasingly an expensive bottleneck when it comes to the introduction of new and evolving software-led business initiatives. That’s an issue for the majority of organizations that are looking to accelerate their time to market for new applications, particularly in the SAP environment, where continued reliance on manual testing as the primary form of software testing is leading to real productivity and innovation issues.

Support for end-to-end business processes Today’s core business processes are much broader and more complex, often crossing multiple technologies and deployment models. While it was previously possible for software test teams to test separate business processes on an application-by-application basis, they now frequently have to run multiple parallel tests in order to validate end-to-end process performance.

Managing software risks Traditional manual testing approaches introduce inevitable risks, both through the inconsistency of testing and challenges associated with limited risk coverage across key business processes. Unlike automated software testing, manual methods can’t support continuous regression testing where core business processes can be checked every day, reducing the risk of business disruption.

Poor IT resource utilization With manual software testing, there’s invariably pressure on business analysts and users to perform repetitive and time- consuming tasks. Given today’s skilled IT shortage, that’s not an optimized use of their time and it prevents both business and IT staff from focusing on more strategic and higher value activities.

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Acting as a Digital Transformation drag Successful digital transformation initiatives are all about innovation, first-mover advantage and getting improved technology into the hands of business users and customers more quickly. Testing delays introduce concerns around uncertainty and risk, particularly for today’s major SaaS updates where new product updates are measured in weeks not months.

How automated SAP software testing helps

An automated testing approach allows you to keep up with accelerated release processes and carry out end-to-end testing repeatedly and iteratively to ensure quality. Such an approach addresses the specific challenges posed by reliance on manual testing, specifically…

Removing software delivery bottlenecks Adopting an automation strategy helps in terms of delivering shorter project timelines, with potential 40% reductions in project length due to a telescoping of the testing process.

Addressing the need to test across end-to-end business processes An automated software testing approach enables continuous testing of end-to-end business processes across multiple enterprise apps. This reduces the risk of business disruption by exposing potential errors and defects early—before they can impact your production environment.

Enabling risk-based testing and new levels of risk coverage With automated software testing, best practice solutions now combine risk-based testing with significantly broader test coverage. This allows software teams to prioritize testing according to risk, while also cutting current SAP regression testing times from weeks to minutes.

More effective use of IT resources Automation eliminates the burden of manual software testing. This releases potentially tens of thousands of expensive and limited resource hours each year—giving CIOs and their teams much more opportunity to research new IT innovations and bring them to market more quickly.

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Real results with SAP test automation

Here’s a taste of the benefits that several leading organizations have achieved by automating their SAP testing process with Tricentis.

AGL Energy—Dramatically accelerating release cycles To support a “Customer Experience Transformation” program, AGL’s management launched an Idea to Production in 5 days initiative for AGL’s SAP delivery units. However, the teams responsible for these units quickly realized that achieving this goal would require them to accelerate their quarterly SAP IS-U and SAP CRM backend delivery cycles. One key hurdle to this acceleration was their lengthy regression test cycles. How could they move from idea to production in 5 days when their regression test cycle took more than a week? With Tricentis test automation, they were able to run 95.5% of their tests on a daily basis.

Dolby Laboratories—Increasing regression coverage “When testing was manual, our business system analysts weren’t running all of the tests because of limited time and resources. They only ran the portion that touched the code, and that prevented us from having end-to-end test coverage. With Tricentis test automation, the precise number of hours saved depends on the workstream, but it’s more than 75% of the time saved for business system analysts and other functional leads. Now, we can run the entire regression test suite immaterial of where the change is, so the amount of coverage we get is close to 100%. Running test cases that are frequently used and are critical to our business is very important and it would have been close to impossible for us to get anywhere near 100% without test automation.” – Mamatha Mitr, Head of Strategy for Testing Center of Excellence, Dolby Laboratories

Varian—Streamlining S/4HANA migration “We typically upgrade our core SAP environment at least yearly, and we always strive to reduce the cycle time associated with the upgrades. We discovered that a massive amount of time was spent on manual regression testing for each cycle, and we committed to reduce the testing burden that we put on business users. We’ve now used Tricentis test automation for 3 years for many enhancement pack and support pack upgrades, as well as for our SAP S/4HANA migration. With the need to release more frequently across different applications in the landscape, it is imperative that you have an automation framework that lets you accelerate testing. Manual testing is simply not scalable. Test automation reduced testing time 93% and reduced testing costs 35%.” – Arnab Mukherjee, Manager Enterprise Applications, Varian

About Tricentis

With the industry’s #1 Continuous Testing platform, Tricentis is recognized for reinventing software testing for DevOps. Through risk-based testing, scriptless end-to-end test automation, and the industry’s most extensive technology support, Tricentis breaks through the barriers experienced with conventional software testing methods. Our innovative technologies simplify testing for even the most complex enterprise applications—transforming testing from a roadblock to a catalyst for innovation.