Best practices for modernizing enterprise app testing, from SAP to SFDC and beyond

As the foundation for an organization’s most critical business processes – many of which are being profoundly, rapidly redefined – enterprise applications are an increasingly critical source of innovation. But modernization is complicated. IT leaders must juggle multiple initiatives, from adoption of SaaS technologies to legacy modernization and cloud migration – all while ensuring that the business workflows that rely on these applications are not interrupted in the process.

While testing transformation initiatives have typically focused on traditional software development, new research reveals a mounting imperative to extend modern quality strategies across the enterprise application landscape, from SAP to Salesforce and beyond. The report, titled “The Rise of Enterprise Application Testing,” examines the market forces that have given rise to this trend and shares the strategies leading organizations have implemented to achieve continuous business innovation.

For many organizations, transforming software delivery processes for enterprise applications is a complex puzzle. These are the mission-critical systems that power an ever-increasing array of day-to-day business processes, from enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and IT service management (ITSM), to business intelligence (BI), finance, and human resources management tools. They are likely running in some combination of on-premise, private cloud, and public cloud environments, and they are often evolving in parallel.

Evolution comes in many forms – including changes driven by the business, updates released by the vendor, and upgrades driven by IT. As the core of business operations and the foundation of digital transformation, defects come at a much higher cost. Any single business process may span dozens of these applications, creating endless potential failure points that could bring those processes to a halt. And the scope is growing ever larger. IDC predicts that the global market for enterprise applications will grow to $309 billion by 2023, as organizations build out new or replace legacy infrastructure to meet the challenges of the digital economy.

The question is, what does this mean for testing? According to testing and technology leaders we interviewed, it is now imperative to apply the continuous testing methods that have transformed traditional software development to enterprise application projects. By aligning on a modern testing approach enterprise-wide, these leaders are successfully managing updates across SAP, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, and other applications to support continuous business innovation, increase the pace of application modernization, and accelerate cloud migration. The report shares details about the challenges they faced along the way, as well as best practices for extending modern quality strategies across the enterprise application landscape, such as:

• Extending Agile and DevOps principles across the enterprise application landscape
• Enabling business users with domain expertise to contribute to testing
• Using smart technologies to cover more business risk with less testing
• Addressing the test automation skills gap
• Developing processes that verify functionality before, during, and after a major upgrade or migration

To learn more, download the report.