What you should look for in your SAP Testing Solution?

The SAP testing industry is continuously changing. Enterprise's journey towards a continuous delivery of customer experience innovation is in full swing, and Quality Assurance and Testing organizations are very much in the eye of the storm.

This article addresses the challenges faced by test managers today – such as the need for increased visibility, control, standardization, and automation of manual processes - which most testing solutions fail to answer. What they need is a test acceleration solution to organize, measure and manage testing cycles without having to compromise on scope or quality. Choosing the right SAP testing solution can stop the stress in testing and help your organization stay ahead of the curve.

You can look out for the following capabilities while choosing your next testing solution in this article.

Table of contents

• Importance of SAP Testing
• Business Process Centricity
• Visibility and Collaboration
• Workflow and Process Automation
• Testing That Mirrors Production
• Agile Test Management & Acceleration
• KTern’s Digital Labs
• Next Steps

Importance of SAP Testing

SAP (Systems, Applications, and Products) is a popular enterprise resource planning (ERP) software used by many organizations to streamline their business processes. Given the critical role SAP plays in managing an organization's operations, it is essential to ensure that it is running smoothly and efficiently. This is where SAP testing comes in.

SAP testing involves a series of tests that are conducted to verify the functionality, performance, and security of the SAP system. The importance of SAP testing cannot be overstated, as it has the potential to impact an organization's bottom line. Here are some reasons why SAP testing is crucial:

Quality assurance: SAP testing helps ensure that the system functions as intended and that the data is accurate. This is important because inaccurate data can lead to wrong business decisions.

Risk management: SAP testing helps identify and mitigate risks associated with the system, such as data breaches and system failures.

Compliance: SAP testing helps ensure that the system complies with regulatory requirements, such as GDPR and HIPAA.

Efficiency: SAP testing helps identify and fix performance issues, such as slow response times and system crashes, which can impact productivity and customer satisfaction.

Cost-effectiveness: SAP testing helps identify and fix issues before they become costly problems, such as system downtime and lost revenue.

Business Process Centricity

With change delivery to enterprise applications becoming instrumental in the competitive race to win, serve, and retain customers, the testing activities are also becoming more pivotal, as business process quality is deemed more important than time-to-market. The infrastructure for technical and functional SAP testing must be present and connected to every phase of the SAP Activate Methodology.

While a new code change may work well within its own element, a business process test qualifies the change to the daily business. Pursuing business process-centricity means that test cycles must be validated with business process awareness, leveraging the knowledge of subject-matter experts, who might be cross-functional and geographically dispersed.

Visibility and Collaboration

In line with the Business-IT convergence trend, SAP test managers need visibility into test readiness. The lack of progress visibility and production data available for test case creation leads testing executives to take an extra cautious approach and as a result, test more and delay delivery. 31% of testers admit to always test more than needed to ensure quality, causing delays. With customer experience in the forefront of all businesses today, SAP testing must support business process validation. Testing is no longer just about verifying that technical aspects of SAP application changes work correctly but also, the validation of customer against business requirements.

Therefore, an SAP testing solution must provide real-time visibility and tracking of all testing stages, the results, and the defects, as well as workflow management. Multiple stakeholders should not only see but also be able to act on real-time information. It should support seamless communication and collaboration between different and globally dispersed stakeholders, such as business users, testers and developers. Features like system-wide defect tracking that enables communication with developers, testers, users and even third-party applications partners are a plus.

Workflow and Process Automation

Test automation is coveted by all but still too costly implement without risks, perhaps due to the lack of dedicated developers. However, automation is a top priority for SAP testing executives - the lack of which identified as the second largest test execution challenge.

An SAP testing tool must support holistic test automation. Test automation needs to be an integral part of the entire execution process. Moreover, there is a greater, unfulfilled scope for test automation, neglected by most SAP testing solutions. Automating test design, allotment, workflow management and other process orchestration activities can reduce global test efforts by 30%. Features like the automatic sequencing of manual tests, automatic capturing of test results, auto- creation of test scripts and on-demand availability of the above via a central platform can make test automation an integral part of the entire execution process.

Testing That Mirrors Production

There is a growing demand for synergies between IT and Business. This includes more collaboration, ongoing business requirements awareness, joint planning and transparency and an overall business process-oriented approach to application lifecycle management. This trend is expected to intensify in the future. But, this new business-driven approach to testing exposes gaps in IT organizations’ readiness for continuous delivery of change. In fact, creating testing scenarios that accurately reflect business processes is currently the top test planning challenge.

To accommodate the Business-IT convergence trend, choose an SAP testing solution that mirrors the way business is conducted in the real world.

Agile Test Management & Acceleration

While testing decisions and processes are driven by the understanding of business requirements and the need to improve customer experience, test execution is hindered by the lack of appropriate tools. 40% of SAP test managers claim to be challenged by the lack of business-oriented testing reports. In fact, when asked about their top test execution challenges, most testing leaders reported tools that are unfriendly to non-technical testers and require intensive training.

As the complexity of SAP increases, testing your applications becomes more crucial and at the same time, more difficult. Clearly, the pressure is on SAP test managers to deliver production-ready applications quickly, which means being agile while maintaining control. Testing managers are now required to ensure that as business requirements evolve throughout enterprise applications’ lifecycle, the application change they deliver never strays off those requirements.

KTern’s Digital Labs

Including these five key features in your requirements for a test management tool would ensure greater subject-matter expert adoption, better ROI, less bottlenecks and most importantly, total visibility into your cross-organization, multi-geography testing project.

It’s important to choose a tool that mirrors the way your organization works throughout an end-to-end business process. In as much as your operations require automation, collaboration, visibility, compliance and process – your test management method should reflect it. KTern’s Digital Labs is an end-to-end test management solution, built specifically for SAP Digital Transformation projects, that offers all five key elements mentioned above. It delivers 30% to 40% reduction in testing effort.

KTern’s Digital Labs has the following salient features:

1. Built on SAP’s Activate framework, specifically for SAP transformation projects
2. An in-built AI based** S/4HANAPEDIA** rule engine
3. Value, Volume and Velocity (VVV) based auto test case recommendations
4. Auto test case executions and defects repository
5. Tightly integrated project management capabilities
6. 30% - 40% reduction in total project cost and timeline

Next Steps

You might want to get a first-hand feel of KTern’s Digital Labs and its several other modules which help automate and govern SAP projects from start to finish.

You can get started with the same at  Getting Started . Alternatively, if you would like a guided demo of the product from one of our product engineers, kindly get in touch with us by submitting a message at Contact Us.