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Salt River Project

How Salt River Project reduced testing when implementing SAP EHP8 and SAP HANA

Company overview

“LiveCompare provides detailed information on what we need to test. Without analysis, the team at SRP may miss important changes, putting the business at risk.”– Suzanne Casey, Team Lead Enterprise Systems Quality Assurance

Located in Arizona, Salt River Project (SRP) is a community-based, not-for-profit water and energy company. It provides water and power to more than 2 million people living in central Arizona and is one of the nation’s largest public and power utility companies. SRP went live with SAP in 2013, upgrading to EHP7 in 2015 and then migrating to SAP HANA and EHP8 early 2018.

“The team typically releases two large projects and around 28 smaller releases per year,” explained Suzanne Casey, Team Lead Enterprise Systems Quality Assurance. To help SRP release software quicker and with fewer defects, they use Tricentis LiveCompare software.

The challenge

To support business innovation, SRP was looking to migrate to SAP HANA and upgrade its systems to the latest Enhancement Pack – EHP8. When introducing any change to SAP, that change needs to be tested. SRP wanted to be confident that changes wouldn’t break production.

“In the past we’ve typically taken a “test everything” approach. This was time and labor intensive, resulting in lengthy user acceptance testing cycles,” explained Suzanne.

SRP wanted to find a new way to approach testing when faced with their SAP HANA migration and EHP8 upgrade. As part of their testing strategy, SRP also uses HP ALM from Micro Focus to create key re-usable automated test scripts.

The solution

For SRP, the answer to decrease testing cycles and increase quality was LiveCompare, Tricentis smart DevOps software for SAP applications. By integrating LiveCompare into their automated testing strategy, SRP achieved the following results:

  • Reduced System Integration Testing by 25% when compared with their EHP7 project.
  • Reduced User Acceptance Testing by 50% when compared with their EHP7 project.

Smart testing

SRP uses LiveCompare to focus on the most-at-risk objects to test when introducing change to their SAP system. “LiveCompare provides detailed information on what we need to test,” said Suzanne. “Without this analysis, the team at SRP may miss important changes, putting the business at risk.”

Once the analysis has run, the team gets a handy list of what to test as the relevant test cases are written to Micro Focus HP ALM.

“By using LiveCompare as part of our SAP HANA and EHP8 projects, we’ve been able to detect defects quicker and improve quality. We’ve significantly decreased our testing timeframes and time spent on unplanned work. We can be sure we are providing quality software releases” – Suzanne Casey, Team Lead, Enterprise Systems Quality Assurance

 

Smart integrations

To enable complete visibility and a DevOps approach to managing SAP testing, SRP integrates LiveCompare with Micro Focus HP ALM to identify where they have gaps in their test scripts. If any test cases are missing, they can then add these into MicroFocus HP ALM before they start testing.

This integration means they can be sure that the tests they have built cover exactly what will change.

LiveCompare picks up the automated test scripts and the integration tells them if they have gaps in their tests.

Smart test audits

SRP also uses LiveCompare to audit their test process. They can be sure that testing processes have been followed correctly and that the appropriate transports have been moved to production.

  • Arrow Icon “By using LiveCompare, we’ve reduced our user acceptance testing by 50% compared with our last enhancement pack project”

Benefits

“By using LiveCompare as part of our SAP HANA and EHP8 projects, we’ve been able to detect defects quicker and improve quality,” said Suzanne. “We’ve significantly decreased our testing timeframes and time spent on unplanned work. We can be sure we are providing quality software releases.”

  • Quicker detection of defects
  • Decreased testing timeframes
  • Decreased risk
  • Decreased time spent on unplanned work
  • Increased trust in software releases
  • Improved quality of released customized software