Tricentis SAP Testing Manifesto review: Accelerate the entire testing lifecycle

By Kapil Saxena, Practice Head – SAP Testing, Wipro Limited

There is a tidal wave of organizations eager to complete a digital transformation to become more app-driven. Adding to that, recent research indicates that SAP S/4HANA migration is a top priority for most organizations. These are large IT projects involving many changes that present significant risks… in a complex ecosystem where any single change could have a negative impact on the business.

This highlights the need for effective testing, as rigorous due diligence has become more critical. Curtailing the testing process will almost certainly lead to failure. Companies need a trusted testing methodology that can minimize risk while enabling the speed and velocity of change needed to meet market demands.

The SAP Testing Manifesto

At its core, the SAP Testing Manifesto is specifically designed to address the speed of change happening in technology. Companies know they must embrace change or risk getting left behind. This is a tall order when change itself comes with risk. But, if organizations can employ a testing process that improves trust and lowers risk, accelerated change becomes obtainable.

Tricentis, designated a market leader in testing by Forrester and SAP’s choice for faster, safer releases, has developed a set of rules for effective testing. The Tricentis SAP Testing Manifesto contains seven basic principles:

1. Embrace change or die
2. Answer 3 core questions: What to test? Does it work? Does it scale?
3. Create the right tests, not the “right number” of tests
4. Regression-test potential change impacts — and nothing more
5. Automate strategically
6. Think beyond functional test automation
7. Think beyond SAP

 

Any IT team can recognize that these principles, if addressed properly, enable an enterprise to embrace the change required to evolve while minimizing the risk of disruptions.

Automation at the core

With increasing automation of development processes, organizations can deliver new features and functionality efficiently, with reduced costs, and in shorter time frames. In frameworks like Agile and DevOps, most automation is centered around execution activities. These frameworks have helped developers deliver code faster. Faster code is good, but is it reliable?

As companies race to complete large-scale digital transformations, it is important not to lose focus on end-to-end testing. Wipro advocates addressing testing automation at the beginning of the project, concentrating on testing-lifecycle automation to achieve higher-quality results. But the goal should not be 100% testing automation. Focus on strategic testing automation at the digital core, which can give much faster ROI.

How Wipro utilizes the SAP Testing Manifesto to manage testing

The strategy should be to make testing lightweight, faster, self-sustained, and results-oriented. Wipro’s Genie solution allows testing teams to identify test scenarios and test cases upfront, providing confidence in testing coverage while ensuring scalability for any upgrade, today and in the future. Using Tricentis products along with Wipro’s Genie solution, testing teams can quickly address core questions like what to test, does it work, and does it scale? In addition, it ensures that teams create the right tests, not the right number of tests.

While development sprints are in progress, testing teams need computational intelligence and not guesswork to ensure they are testing only what needs to be tested. LiveCompare, one of the Tricentis testing products, identifies the impact that any change has on the application and pulls out only selected test cases that are relevant for a specific change. If upfront automation has been done, then executing these test cases instantly ensures that the proper regression test will be conducted. Coverage, automation, and impact analysis have to be seamlessly integrated to realize the dream of immediate and continuous testing.

For companies working on their SAP S4/HANA migration, so much focus is on testing SAP applications.  However, do not forget that the integration with legacy and other cloud applications is the backbone of an organization’s migration success. To ensure the complete landscape is tested, give equal consideration to non-SAP applications. SAP and non-SAP applications must be automated seamlessly for proper automated regression testing.

The SAP Testing Manifesto: The final analysis

The combined power of Wipro’s proprietary tools like Genie, augmented with the Tricentis toolset including Tosca, LiveCompare, qTest, and NeoLoad, is the perfect pitch for integrated, accelerated lifecycle automation starting from the blueprint phase. These tools apply across greenfield, brownfield, technical, and functional upgrades. Utilizing the SAP Testing Manifesto, companies can achieve significant benefits in testing, including reduced cycle time, lower cost, and increased quality.