Deutsche Börse Group

Deutsche Börse Group trades manual SAP testing process to gain speed and precision

Company overview

As an international exchange organization and provider of innovative market infrastructure, Deutsche Börse Group offers investors, financial institutions and companies access to global capital markets. Per Deutsche Börse, they “operate to the most exacting standards to create products and services to meet the needs of international financial markets.” With a strategic focus on innovation and new technologies, the company strives to stay on the cutting edge of technology. For this, it is running a hybrid multi-cloud strategy, bringing step-by-step IT infrastructure into the public cloud, while complying with high regulatory standard for the financial industry. This also includes committing to migrate finance, billing, tax, treasury, and master data processes of 80 legal entities onto the new SAP S/4HANA platform.

Deutsche Börse has invested in test automation since the early days of agile, and have seen considerable success with automating testing on various internal applications. However, within the departments Financial Accounting & Controlling (FA&C) and Corporate IT, quality assurance had been limited to manual testing due to the complex nature of testing custom code and specialized challenges of test automation.

The move to S/4HANA was a major priority to the business and needed to be completed with both speed and precision. That’s when the decision was made to find a testing solution to help accelerate the initial migration—and increase speed to release on future SAP projects and updates.

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    Industry: Financial Services
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    Organization size: 10,200 employees
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    Location: Global
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Solution

Reimo Mueller, Test Manager for SAP Transformation at Deutsche Börse Group, had to look no further than inside his own organization to find the right tool for the job.

Tricentis Tosca test automation was selected as the tool of choice based on its proven track record at Deutsche Börse (they were using it to test other applications in their portfolio), and SAP recommending it for S/4HANA migrations. To complement test automation, Tricentis qTest was also selected to manage test case traceability against requirements through a best-in-class integration with their requirements management tool, Atlassian Jira. Through the integration of SAP Solution Manager to Jira and GitHub, Deutsche Börse ensured a complete process and traceability from requirements, to tests, to the transports to production.

In order to upskill SAP domain experts on creating test automation, the team leveraged Tricentis Academy to quickly get up and running on both tools. The team found each course to be an easy and quick guide to test automation they could complete in a short period of time.

For the project, Jira is used to detail business solutions and scenarios, technical dependencies, epics, and scenarios. Once the epic is described and requirements linked, developers run ABAP code unit tests, which they track through qTest for traceability and visibility. Once unit tests are completed, user stories are vetted, while automation is created in Tosca for future regression suites in parallel before executing.

  • Arrow IconSAP S/4 HANA migration top priority to the business that needed to be delivered with speed and superior quality
  • Arrow IconComplex test cases were not recognized adequately
  • Arrow IconEach release had to be rigorously tested to maintain reputation of superior quality
  • Arrow IconManual regression testing was time-consuming and required increasing efforts
  • Arrow IconIntegrations required retesting due to multiple incoming transports
  • Arrow IconLow traceability of requirements to test cases

Results

The project team broke the process down into six distinct projects touching every aspect of the business, including migrating from a legacy internal billing solution. “We changed the module view into the E2E business processes view (e.g. O2C, A2R, P2P) as basis for our approach, with the challenge of interdependencies between these processes,” says Reimo. The billing process was the first focus of the automation team because of its complexity of testing required and length of time to implement. Within three months, the team was able to automate 80% of the regression tests for the first three sprints.

Deutsche Börse’s advanced mastery of test data management—including synthetic test data generation—proved critical for achieving these impressive results. The nature of their business requires very complex data to initiate and drive tests. With a strategic approach to test data, plus the power of Tricentis helping them create and manage the appropriate volume and range of test data, they can achieve sophisticated and stable test automation for even their most advanced use cases.

While the official go-live for S/4HANA is still upcoming, the testing team is off to a considerable start with test automation. Reimo believes the project would not have progressed as quickly had they continued leveraging manual testing. The regression suites put into place today will continue to support the speed of testing for every new release for SAP S/4HANA into the future.

  • Arrow IconBilling process regression testing already 80% automated
  • Arrow IconSynthetic test data creation for advanced use cases
  • Arrow IconIncreased requirements traceability with qTest
  • Arrow IconAbility to release 10+ SAP updates per year