The Information Technology industry is witnessing an unprecedented evolution in how software is delivered. To succeed, testing professionals must use the right combination of people, processes, and tools – and traditional tools no longer apply to the new rules of software delivery.
It’s 2018 and the entire landscape of SAP Quality Assurance and Testing has evolved to the point where it’s no longer a question of balancing velocity of delivery with quality. Whether that is planning for an ECC migration to S/4 Hana, upgrading to the latest SPS issued by SAP, or going through the regression testing cycle on a standard monthly SAP service pack – there is no longer a need to sacrifice quality to meet the deadlines imposed by your stakeholders. There is also no need to inflate the level of manual testing for added quality assurance to appease others.
To affect lasting change throughout an organization as it relates to both Quality Assurance and Testing, Test Managers must consider the ease-of-use and deployment mechanisms available to them for any tool or platform they introduce into the Enterprise Application Delivery (EAD) lifecycle. If the technology used doesn’t offer user experience, ease-of-use, deployment issues, incompatibility issues, and more, you can expect fallout and discontinued adoption.
So, here are three reasons why you need to adopt modern quality management tool for SAP:
#1 – Manual SAP Testing is End-to-End, from Unit to Regression
When it comes to defect management, there is a distinct difference between “detection” and “prevention.” Detecting defects with dynamic testing is a reactive approach at the core of Traditional SAP Quality Management, whereas preventing defects starts with proven change impact analysis that identifies what will break because of the transports you have staged to implement. Defect prevention is at the Core of Modern SAP Quality Management and is the epitome of being proactive, shifting-left, and being Agile.
With Panaya Test Dynamix, the intelligence under-the-hood provides your team with suggested unit tests based on an extract provided from your QA and Production environments. The unit tests are auto-generated and readily available for your “co-captain” (so to speak) to pick up and test. You can also string those same unit tests into end-to-end business process tests, whilst providing your Process Champions with a tool to quickly and easily run through more complex business scenarios with Panaya’s test player that auto-captures screenshots, data inputs, and data outputs.
The scientific advancements in machine learning and predictive analytics simulation pioneered by Panaya has transformed modern SAP Quality Management and Testing to the point where all testing layers should be managed in one single unified platform, from unit testing through UAT and Regression.
Your organization can bulletproof your SAP quality gate by choosing a unified tool that balances the qualitative and quantitative – effectively producing the absolute best outcomes, which is Zero Critical Defects.
#2 – Visibility and collaboration go hand in hand
Do you find yourself overwhelmed with Microsoft SharePoint Lists, Excel Spreadsheets, and E-mail? They don’t really help you manage testing, do they? Instead, your testing tool should be your single source of truth to monitor all test workflows so you can easily identify and remove bottlenecks.
When it comes to planning, executing, monitoring and evaluating the results of UAT, you need input from multiple and often globally dispersed stakeholders who have no visibility into when it’s truly “their turn” to test. As a result, your UAT is doomed to delays and inefficiencies. Test coordination is critical to ensure smooth workflows and handover of testing tasks between key users. In addition, it’s not an easy task to track non-quantitative data often entered in various formats by different people.
Features such as automatic sequencing of manual tests, handover of testing tasks between key users, progress monitoring and central defect management accelerate the entire execution process. Built-in collaboration tools can eliminate idle time, relieve workload bottlenecks and ensure sequential workflows, with effortless communication and automatic transition of test steps to the next user.
#3 – Idle time is a problem
Imagine this scenario. You’re 2 weeks into an 8-week User Acceptance Testing (UAT) cycle for a critical SAP S/4 HANA Implementation. Your planned test execution rate to stay on track is 55 scripts per week, but your actual test execution rate is 23 scripts per week. The CIO has been clear that he only has the budget for 8 weeks of UAT – this is to include all defect remediation as well (the pressure is on). In your morning 9am standup call with the Functional and Business Leads, you ask the functional teams to “pick up the pace” and try to average 55 scripts per week, per functional area. You explain to them that the scope of UAT depends on them averaging this specific target per week to complete UAT within the 8-week time allotted by upper management. The responses you receive back vary depending on the functional area, but sound something along the lines of:
- “We’re hitting master data issues and this is slowing us down. The UAT environment wasn’t properly setup prior to the kick off, so we lost about 1.5 weeks of testing.”
- “Security authorizations in SAP aren’t correct and our business users are giving up after a few attempts. They are losing confidence quickly!”
- “The SCM guys in the Warehouse can’t figure out how to use the Manual Runner in HPQC, so they’ve been asking me to send them steps in an email. I’m trying to manage their actual results (evidence) and screen shots via e-mail and it’s taking me a lot longer than expected.”
- “IT won’t approve admin rights for the Business Users to access HPQC for the first time to install those ActiveX controls you showed us. You need to escalate this up to the top and get it approved ASAP so that we can move this down the court.
And the most commonly heard response:
- “We did our part in the business process. The interface succeeded, so the team over on the Salesforce side should have picked up the order and the FIN team should be ready to verify and validate the financial docs back in S/4 after SAP Process Orchestration (PO) does its job.”
If you’re planning a UAT phase for an SAP project – make sure you fully realize and appreciate the hands-offs that will occur between users executing the business process tests. Most legacy ALM tools only track test execution at the test-level, not the step-level. Make sure you are tracking test step execution and ensuring that the baton is passed quickly to the next tester with the right data inputs.
User Acceptance Testing – Simplified
Help business users make acceptance testing a priority by simplifying it. Gain user adoption and execute faster and safer UAT cycles.