When thinking of your ERP system, Agility is not the first thing that comes to mind – but that needs to change.
Pressure to Quickly Enhance and Update Enterprise Applications
Today, Enterprise applications bring competitive differentiation to the business and in doing so Enterprise IT have become increasingly bound to the performance and capabilities of these applications, ERP and CRM for example. However, while Enterprise operations are under unceasing pressure to enhance and update their applications, these applications have become increasingly complex to innovate and maintain.
SAP systems, specifically, meant for operational continuity can be used today to differentiate products and services and support overall strategic business goals. This being said, today SAP applications need to deliver functionality faster, responding to the increased pace of change in the business. And, as SAP is a critical application it must be delivered with quality and governance.
Meeting all these demands, requires IT teams to forgo waterfall delivery and move into a more Agile mode, not always so simple with your SAP system. Doing so will require teams to work in shift left addressing things like requirements management and testing early in the delivery cycle.
The Need for Modern ALM
To introduce Agility, Enterprise IT must adopt modern ALM solutions that are collaborative, bringing together all stakeholders – business, development, QA and release teams, offer end-to-end visibility and work easily out of the box (who has time for lengthy on-boarding and user training). And, to increase Agility, while ensuring quality, these solutions must offer key functionality in three areas:
- Impact analysis: Why? Even changing one line of code can have severe impact beyond the module within which it is contained in. How do we analyze and track these impacts? Tapping into and analyzing the vast amount of data that lies across your software development ecosystem can provide you with the insights and alerts you need to make fast and intelligent decisions.
- Risk-based testing: Why? How often do you spend time “over testing?” According to a recent Spiceworks Testing survey, lack of visibility into risk and quality leads testing executives to take an extra cautious approach and as a result, test more and delay delivery – 31% over-test to ensure minimal risk after go-live.
Panaya Release Dynamix, Modern ALM for Agile SAP
Panaya Release Dynamix (RDx) is a modern ALM solution that delivers continual insight into your SAP release quality. With RDx, Project and Release managers can factor in overall risk of a release quality, not only based on test execution and defect management, but also test plan validity and requirements traceability. With real-time risk analysis, smart test plan validation, defect lifecycle management and optimized test resources, RDx helps to lower incident rate in production.
RDx, the Functionality to Shift Left
To address the risk at the start of the cycle, Panaya RDx offers:
Impact analysis – Ensuring your business changes, customizations or custom development from the start. Immediately analyze your transport before moving to QA to predict on a multidimensional level the impact to your business process before entering into production. Continually using data analytics along with propriety machine algorithms, Panaya builds your unique connection map based on your ABAP code base line.
Risk-based Testing – Clear and accurate risk-based testing allows IT organizations to test the right things.
- Automatically generate test plans based on impacted transaction that define the optimal coverage capable of addressing all risk using existing test libraries.
- Automatic suggestions to reuse your current Test Cases assets for maximum coverage for the impacted entry points
RDx goes beyond shift left, bringing together all data and functionality to provide real-time risk analysis. With one dashboard, your “risk cockpit,” everyone can visualize all areas of risk for each stakeholder that identifies low medium and high risk to status of development, test planning coverage, change risk, test execution, defects closure and overall requirements completion.
Everything is covered in one place, for everyone, with in-platform communications and an easy for everyone look and feel – this is the definition of modern and in turn, this enables Agile. Release Dynamix, a modern ALM solution, is the SAP approach to Continuous Delivery. We call this Enterprise Agile Delivery.
Learn more in our upcoming webinar, Bringing Continuous Delivery into the Enterprise.