Modernizing SAP Testing in the Energy Industry

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. With Tricentis’ intuitive extraction wizards working with hand-in-hand with advanced anonymization techniques, it’s easy to ensure that test data is 100% compliant. The complexities of secure, stateful TDM are exacerbated in SAP environments, where business processes may cross SAP GUI and SAP Fiori, mainframes, and other packaged apps such as Salesforce— and test data may be scattered across Word files, Excel files, databases, flat files, and SAP systems. Tricentis coordinates test data design/collection, generation, and provisioning across the compete business process to ensure that continuous tests can execute repeatedly, consistently, and accurately.

Transforming SAP Testing with Tricentis Tricentis helps leading enterprises:

• Modernize testing to reduce the risk of change

• Reduce risks and delays in S/HANA migrations

• Accelerate quality processes for Agile speed

• Ensure flawless performance in the cloud

Here’s a look at how two energy companies conquer their SAP testing challenges by working with Tricentis.

The Linde Groups Accelerates Testing for Extremely Complex Applications (Without Increasing Costs) The Linde Group is one of the world’s largest industrial gas company by market share as well as revenue. Over the past few years, their leaders have prioritized digital transformation initiatives that will propel this 100+ year old company into the digital future. Additionally, the organization is committed to rolling out weekly SAP updates to ensure they’re maximizing their investment in the “intelligent enterprise.” Linde’s QA department must ensure that this accelerated rate of change does not negatively impact the business processes that employees, partners, and customers rely on. However, the application stack driving the core business is extremely complex. The Gas division alone has 18 highly-customized SAP instances and 184 different applications. For years, testing these applications was a difficult process that involved a variety of roles, tools, and specialized expertise. Increasing the challenge, the QA team was expected to achieve greater coverage of the core applications—while lowering costs.

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Their key testing challenges included:

• 18 SAP instances and 184 different applications (SAP SRM / ERP, Salesforce CRM / PRM | Service Cloud), Windows 10, Office 365, legacy apps, mobile apps, web apps, and more)

• Innovation initiatives and accelerated SAP update schedule required more frequent, faster testing

• Each application type was using specialized automation tools and resources

• Test automation with the current toolset (UFT, QC, SeeTest, Selenium) would be too costly and time-consuming

• Technical test automation experts were required to develop and maintain automation

• Brittle scripts required excessive maintenance to execute

• Their legacy testing tool vendor was not evolving the tool set for Agile and DevOps

• Test automation was limited by the complexity of the test automation tool set

Linde’s Head of Service and Security Management, Andreas Aigner, realized that they couldn’t just speed up their existing QA approach—they had to fundamentally change it. To satisfy expectations of increased application coverage with greater speed but lower costs, they had to dramatically simplify testing. They partnered with Tricentis to establish a new testing approach that enabled everyone from developers to business users to automate testing for everything from SAP, to Salesforce, to mobile apps. Now, business users can simply exercise the application to indicate what functionality is core to test. Testing resources (formerly manual testers) can use that blueprint to build the automation, and testers or developers can easily evolve the test automation to keep pace with application updates. All new tests are implemented in Tricentis Tosca and test automation for 11 applications—primarily in the SAP and Digital area—has been achieved in the first six months.

• Scriptless approach enabled higher test automation rates, with significantly reduced maintenance effort

• A single solution supports SAP, Salesforce, mobile, web and other technologies involved in end-to-end transactions

• Selenium tests are integrated into the Tricentis platform for end-to-end testing

• Risk-based approach highlights what to test first and how to allocate testing resources

• Internal TCoE resources could be applied to any type of projects that required testing—improving efficiency and resource utilization

• Agile and DevOps initiatives are supported with capabilities like CI/CD integration, native API testing, broad technology support, lights-out execution, and test data management

AGL Energy Transforms SAP Testing for Agile AGL is a leading provider of gas, electricity, and solar photovoltaic solutions to more than 3.6 million customer accounts across Australia. Recognizing that today’s customers expect faster and more personalized ways to interact with their utility providers, AGL invested $300 million in a Customer Experience Transformation (CXT) program. To support the program,

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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? Their key testing challenges included:

• 50% of the software development lifecycle was spent on testing

• Testing consumed 30% of the development and delivery teams’ budget

• Regression test suite took more than one week to execute due to low automation rates

• Manual test data generation and preparation caused hassles and release delays

AGL realized that a modernization of their SAP testing processes was a key component to a successful launch of their CXT program. After an extensive evaluation of test automation solutions, AGL selected Tricentis Tosca to automate their end-to-end regression test suite, provide an innovative test data management strategy, and integrate into their existing SAP delivery toolsets. Working with Tricentis, AGL has been able to:

• Shift their QA focus from completing the expected array of tests to thoroughly assessing release quality—helping IT leaders better understand (and minimize) the risks associated with each release.

• Maximize system quality by adopting Continuous Testing to expose defects as soon as they are introduced

• Reduce test data management time by 66.7%

• Accelerate regression testing time 95.5%