Before moving forward with the SAP testing insights, we first need to have an idea about the basics of what SAP and moreover what ERP is all about.
ERP, or Enterprise Resource planning as it’s called, is a comprehensive resources software that offers advanced and extensive features for organizing and managing your company processes on a single digital platform. These processes include production, manufacturing, logistics, distribution, finance, CRM, sales, human resources, etc. It’s an integrated platform that accelerates data sharing through its interconnected modules. It helps eliminate data redundancy and efficiently utilizes available resources across departments and business processes.
SAP (or Systems, Applications and Products) on the other hand, is one of the most popular ERP solutions used by major Fortune 500 companies across the globe. It enables companies to manage business processes efficiently and minimize operational costs.
What is SAP Testing?
SAP testing involves testing different modules of the SAP ERP software. A typical ERP system comprises of different modules like the way we mentioned above; finance, accounting sales etc. SAP offers a standard template for all these modules which are later customized as per individual company’s specific requirements. Post these customizations, businesses approach an SAP testing service provider to test their customization and ensure they function efficiently as per their business’ set standards. That’s where SAP testing comes centre stage, ensuring the software is efficiently adopted inside the company systems.
Post SAP is completely absorbed into the system, it requires constant updates, such as new module implementations or bug fixes that again require thorough testing before being released into the company systems. Hence SAP testing is an ongoing process that must work in cycles to avoid downtimes and increase employee efficiency.
Types of SAP Testing
There are 8 different types of SAP testing types that any software testing company would incorporate into their testing suite to ensure end-to-end testing of your complete business processes
1. Unit Testing
Unit testing includes testing every single component or isolated piece of software. More like a white box testing technique, unit testing is generally performed by developers who have full knowledge of the complete code and programming used to test the functionality of the software. It helps reduce the cost of testing at an early stage.
2. Integration Testing
Similar to scenario testing, it’s a type of testing generally performed on realistic data. To see if the systems are functioning efficiently.
3. Regression Testing
Regression testing ensures that the new changes updated on the code will not adversely affect the existing working code. SAP being an integrated system, any change made on a single stack update, OSS note, transport note, or others can affect the functioning of the entire system in use.
4. Performance Testing
This testing checks the performance of an application under the different stimuli. It examines whether the system’s response time is acceptable, what’s the speed of the periodic processes, whether the expected user load on the peak can be supported by the existing systems etc. Essentially it identifies processing bottlenecks and ABAP code inefficiencies.
5. Functional Testing
It ensures that your SAP implementation meets your business requirements as a whole. SAP modules that are delivered by the systems are highly configurable and could be easily integrated with other applications or third-party tools. Functional testing ensures these integrations are well-executed across the platform.
6. Security Testing
Security testing ensures every user can execute transactions and have access to data that’s essentially required. It’s typically done in a QA environment in which test IDs are created giving access to users as per their interaction with the software.
7. End-User Testing & User Acceptance Testing
Though closely related but not identical, the purpose of both these testing methods is to ensure the end-user can execute the designated tasks associated with that particular software. End-user and acceptance testing ideally refer to your original application blueprint and checks if the expected features and functions stated by the client are effectively functioning or not.
8. SAP Interface Testing
It occurs at various points throughout the project. As a part of the project development phase, isolated interface testing falls under the unit testing banner. In the QA environment, interface testing involves observing the execution of business transactions and following the business output that’s generated. Effective interface testing shows how efficiently automated your current systems are.
5 Key Steps to Effective SAP Testing
Transitioning to an SAP-based ERP model can be a tricky task. Agile testing for SAP systems plays a vital role here else approaching it with a manual testing methodology can take weeks or maybe months to be fully executed. Spending too much time before you release every single time you make a change in your model means you are defeating the purpose of moving to SAP altogether.
Below mentioned are 5 key steps for moving to a more efficient SAP testing model:
1. Adopt Test Automation At an Early Stage
Almost all leading software testing companies today are turning to Robotic test automation to keep their businesses safe from bugs, reduce system incompatibilities and security vulnerabilities. Automating your business processes allows you to test changes without any loopholes, more like testing reinvented for the modern Agile testing services.
2. Don’t Just Stick with Risk-Based Testing
One issue with risk-based testing is that companies mostly check only those segments in a system that may have an impact once, change has been made in the other segment. The problem with this form of focused testing methodology is that it essentially skips most interconnected scenarios and therefore opens the organization to more risks and potential process delays. Therefore, you must approach risk-based testing cautiously and ensure no loopholes are left out of the system untested.
3. Go Beyond UI
SAP is used in a variety of ways by multiple organizations. As an effective business unit, you need to ensure your testing is comprehensive in every possible way, making sure you cover every single stakeholder associated with that particular system in use. Manually mapping out the people who may be affected by the slightest change in the interface at any level is next to impossible. Ignoring this step may bring your essential business systems to a screeching halt, particularly when most of your process flows rely on other systems to access and use SAP data for essential business transactions.
4. Move to Shift-Left Testing Techniques
Shifting left in testing means testing early and more often in the entire testing lifecycle for a particular project in hand. As a reality check, most companies often wait till the very end to initiate their SAP testing process, misapprehending it to be a complex process with more than usual dependencies. As a result, most software testing companies end up with delayed-release cycles and products full of defects. Effective use of service virtualizations in the process can help with SAP regression testing early in the testing lifecycle even before the need for a QA for the process. Companies have started shifting left, early and more often in ways that weren’t possible before with the new testing technologies.
5. Integrate Testing with CI/CD
You need to start SAP testing as soon as the code is ready to be deployed. The moment your team reaches the level of testing integrations, going beyond the UI and reaching up to regression testing, you must slip it into the CI/CD workflows. The idea behind incorporating RPA is to make the entire testing process smoother and simpler and hence incorporating it within the Continuous integration and development workflows can help accelerate the process even further.
Hire Experts to Smoothen The Process
The five key steps mentioned above are only a small part of the key essentials you need to make sure your SAP applications are integrated smoothly into your running business flows. Approaching a professional Software testing solutions provider expert in the SAP testing domain can help ease out the process.
