With inadequate or laborious business process test automation, an organization’s SAP test automation initiative will be an uphill battle from the start. It will also likely be a losing battle if it’s easier to manually test certain elements than to create and maintain automated tests for them.
When evaluating SAP testing tools, consider…
- How much manual effort is actually involved in converting collected data to automated tests? In updating the automated tests?
- What SAP elements can be automated out of the box? How many require customization—and what does that customization involve? For example, does the tool provide out-of-the-box support for:
- Unlimited navigation in SAP tables via business readable content identification
- Verification of values in result tables (technically: label containers)
- Status checks in SAP tables
- Navigation in SAP trees via business instruction
- Creation and verification of IDocs
- The various SAP Fiori elements associated with your processes
- How are dynamic SAP Control-IDs handled?
- In what situations is coding required? How frequently will the associated coding need to be updated?
- Can tests be created from logs? Recording user behavior? Drag and drop from a library of options?
- Is the interface intuitive? How long does it take end users to get up to speed and recognize its value?
- How much manual effort is required to reuse test blocks (e.g., for an SAP login process)?
Additional Considerations for Evaluating SAP Testing Tools
Here are some other key points to consider as you evaluate and compare SAP Testing tools…
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.
Business analysts are burdened with testing in addition to all their other duties. Resources for testing are limited, so it’s critical to understand and focus testing efforts on the top business risks.
The increasing pace and scope of SAP updates requires comprehensive, near-continuous testing to identify and resolve potential impacts. You not only need to know what changed; you also need to ensure that your test suite is efficient. Otherwise, you might waste time continuously updating tests that do not add value.
Test Maintenance and Optimization
Many organizations create automated tests, but few achieve sustainable test automation rates. Often, false positives, timeouts, and incomplete tests erode trust in the results. Also, the test suite grows too unwieldy to update—to the point where it seems easier to test manually than update everything that’s out of synch.
Suitability for Agile and DevOps
Studies report that 81% of organizations are adopting DevOps and 91% are adopting Agile. However, you’d have to search long and hard to find an enterprise that doesn’t have scaling Agile and adopting DevOps on its radar. It’s not a matter of if testing will need to accommodate DevOps and Agile, but when.
Gartner’s Evaluations of SAP Testing Tools
Gartner produces two research reports designed to help enterprises select the SAP testing tool that best suits their needs:
- Magic Quadrant for Software Test Automation evaluates the major vendors used to accelerate and scale functional test automation.
- Critical Capabilities for Software Test Automation focuses on how the test automation tools themselves compare on 14 critical capabilities. Note that the “Enterprise End-to-End Testing” use case is the replacement/expansion of the narrower “Packaged Applications” use case from previous years’ reports.
SAP Testing Tools Comparison
Compare SAP testing tools in 5 key categories. Read more.
Automated SAP Testing
How to effortlessly detect impacts to your core end-to-end business transactions—across and beyond SAP. Read more.
SAP Testing Resources
The latest research and best practices on SAP testing. Read more.
