Modernizing SAP Testing in the Energy Industry
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Modernizing SAP Testing in the Energy Industry Tricentis | Modernizing Software Testing in the Energy Industry | 1 Despite the growing emphasis on digital transformation, the average test automation rate remains a dismal 18% overall— and 6% for energy companies, who are commonly working with complex systems including SAP and custom applications. This means that each time the SAP infrastructure or business processes change, enterprises rely on internal business users or dedicated manual testers to click through each critical business process and note whether the expected results are achieved at every step. As you can imagine, this is an incredibly slow and costly process: • Completing a single test cycle commonly takes weeks or even months • Testing is routinely cited as the #1 bottleneck to delivery speed • Testing consumes 30-40% of the average IT budget Now , energy companies are increasingly turning to SAP innovations such as SAP S/4HANA and SAP Cloud to optimize production, extend business processes to capitalize on new opportunities, and accelerate innovation across the value chain. As a result, the pace of change and the complexity of what needs to be tested are constantly increasing dramatically. This presents a number of challenges from a testing perspective: • Automated tests architected for previous generations of SAP platforms must be rebuilt. • Existing testing processes don’t suit the new faster (and more fragmented) release cycles, with different components evolving at different speeds. • Within the SAP ecosystem, testing must address SaaS cloud solutions such as SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Ariba, SAP Fieldglass, and SAP Hybris. • Reinvented business processes commonly extend beyond the SAP ecosystem, including APIs, mobile, mainframes, and so on—but legacy testing approaches often do not. It’s clear that conventional testing approaches, built for prior generation of SAP applications, simply can’t keep up with today’s agile and distributed SAP architectures. But what’s required instead? This paper helps you understand what’s needed to modernize SAP testing, then shares how leading energy companies have applied these recommendations to transform their testing processes. A New Approach to SAP Test Automation Tricentis, #1 for “Enterprise End-to-End Testing” in Gartner’s latest Critical Capabilities report, modernizes SAP business process testing with the most advanced and comprehensive SAP test automation on the market. According to Gartner, “Tricentis provides comprehensive breadth and depth of technology support and offers a model- driven approach to test automation that maximizes maintainability and reuse. Tricentis can test many layers and areas, such as business process testing from an SAP interface, through to various procedures that allow users to understand the total quality effect of a packaged application change in context with integrated systems. Tricentis also covers testing BI data integration and reports, or API endpoints, and supports testing across desktop, browsers and devices.” Here’s a quick look at the key capabilities required for a modern SAP testing solution—and how Tricentis Tosca addresses them. www.tricentis.com © 2018 Tricentis GmbH. All Rights Reserved v Tricentis | Modernizing Software Testing in the Energy Industry | 2 Real-Time, Effortless Creation of Robust, Reusable Tests Less than half of SAP customers leverage advanced test automation to mitigate risks associated with SAP upgrades, service packs, customizations, and enhancements. Why? With legacy/traditional test automation tools, “automated” tests still require a significant amount of user interaction—making manual testing an attractive option. Now, there’s no reason to continue manual testing. Using the Tricentis test case recorder, business-readable scriptless test cases are created in real time as the user exercises the application. This enables teams to take full advantage of test automation without additional effort. Tricentis also offers additional test creation options, such as scanning the application. Recording provides fast capture of the specific controls that the user interacts with. Scanning extends beyond this, capturing all of the controls on each page and making them available as reusable test case “building blocks” that dramatically simplify test automation efforts throughout the team and organization. Across all test creation methods, Tricentis Tosca is architected to enable sustainable test automation for rapidly evolving system. Model-based test automation relieves the “maintenance burden” that undermines most test automation initiatives. When business processes change, the model is updated once, and all impacted tests are automatically synchronized. Additionally, Tricentis’ test case design technology determines the most efficient set of test cases and test data for optimal risk coverage. This accelerates testing while providing unparalleled insight into whether a given update is ready to release. Extensive Technology Support The ability to extend beyond SAP and cover every technology involved in your end-to-end transactions can make the difference between fragmented spurts of automation and a comprehensive, trusted test automation strategy. Tricentis Tosca offers comprehensive support for all the SAP UIs—including SAP WinGUI, SAP NetWeaver, SAP Business Client, SAP Fiori and Fiori 2.0, SAP on Mobile, and SAP S/4HANA. For S/4HANA, Tricentis Tosca supports all current versions (1511, 1610, 1709, and 18xx), as well as all current SAP Fiori interfaces (1.38.x, 1.44.x, 1.52.x)—without requiring any add-ons. www.tricentis.com © 2018 Tricentis GmbH. All Rights Reserved v Tricentis | Modernizing Software Testing in the Energy Industry | 3 Moreover, many digital enterprises today depend on SAP SuccessFactors for HR and HCM solutions, on SAP Ariba for e- Procurement and Supply Chain solutions, on SAP Hybris for eCommerce solutions, and on SAP Concur for travel and expense management solutions. Having a simple, standardized way to define automation across all of these technologies is essential for efficient and effective end-to-end business process test automation. Tricentis Tosca provides test automation support for most popular solutions in the SAP portfolio—SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Ariba, SAP Hybris and SAP Concur—to help enterprises rapidly and reliably test end-to-end business processes. Tricentis Tosca natively supports these technologies out of the box—including SAP C/4 HANA, customized SAP SuccessFactors deployments, all SAP Concur interfaces and controls, all SAP Ariba controls and dynamic content, and more. End-to-End Testing Beyond the Boundaries of SAP Reducing the risks associated with modern enterprises applications requires advanced test automation for the complete end-to-end business process, which may span multiple application components. That’s why this year’s Gartner Critical Capabilities for Software Test Automation report places an emphasis on addressing “a wide range of testing use cases across the enterprise.” In fact, the 2018 report replaces the narrower “Packaged Applications” use case from the previous report with a new, more extensive “Enterprise End-to-End Testing” use case—recognizing the increasing scope and complexity of enterprise testing. Tricentis automates the testing of business processes that may include mobile UIs, web services, ESBs, APIs, web UIs, mainframes, other packaged apps (Salesforce, ServiceNow, Oracle, Siebel, etc.) in addition to SAP technologies. A single test definition can be used across technologies and test types (API, UI, load testing…), dramatically reducing the learning curve and time required for complete test automation. Load Testing for Fiori Modern SAP applications, powered by S/4HANA and Fiori 2.0, involve many highly-distributed components—and a performance issue in any of them could have a ripple effect across the entire application. Tricentis allows anyone involved in the quality process to start load and performance testing from their desktop. The same business-readable test case definitions used for functional testing can be used for load and performance testing. All load test parameters (e.g., ramp up, number of users, overall load) are defined natively in Tricentis Tosca, without going to a third-party tool. Tricentis then distributes the specified load across servers in the cloud, enabling testers to focus on reviewing results and identifying performance issues as efficiently as possible. www.tricentis.com © 2018 Tricentis GmbH. All Rights Reserved v Tricentis | Modernizing Software Testing in the Energy Industry | 4 Secure, GDPR-Compliant Test Data Management Test data management (TDM) is one of the critical capabilities that helps an organization evolve automated tests to continuous tests. It’s impossible to achieve a mature Continuous Testing process unless you have an effective, tightly- integrated way to create, manage, and provision the data required for your tests. A successful TDM strategy is required for both end-to-end regression testing as well as load testing. With Tricentis, any tester can rapidly access the exact data needed for a given scenario and evolve it throughout the course of the test (no DBA or programming required). This enables continuous testing of scenarios that might otherwise be impractical to automate. For years, companies have been extracting data from production environments and using it as their test data. However, GDPR that any test data extracted from production systems be masked irreversibly and deterministically.