Testing Strategy for a SAP ERP Upgrade Project

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While executing an Upgrade , we always give more attention/planning to the actual execution than the testing plans . However for an upgrade to be successful and to be completed without major hitches, Testing does play an important role.

Major testing stages for the upgrade Project are :

• Unit Testing by Developers
• Functional testing
• Standard and Specific Business Scenarios
• End to End testing / Integration testing
• Technical System testing (Before Upgrade on Production)
• User Acceptance Testing
• Regression Testing

What kind of resources are required for testing?

• Development team to execute the unit testing - Basic objective of this testing is to do ground level testing of code, function modules , transaction etc.
• Functionals and Key user in business are responsible for functional testing, business scenarios testing and integration testing.
• Technical System Testing involves the system set up , performance optimization etc which would need resources like Basis and key users .
• End users perform the User acceptance testing
• Business performs the Regression testing.

All through the testing stages we must keep in mind below points : 

• Analysis of major roadblocks
• Defect Tracking and Issues Resolution
• Monitoring the execution of test plans

Testing Systems? Generally a separate QA system is present in the system landscape to carry out extensive testing. This must have sufficient data and authorizations to carry out relevant tests.

Quality and Quantity of test data is very important to ensure smooth production upgrade. The current data is important to ensure the realistic set. Creation and managing data requires some effort in planning and creation.

SAP recommends usage of SAP TDMS (Test Data Migration Server) to migrate subset of production data to ensure proper quality and quantity of data.

SAP Solution Manager : SAP strongly proposes to use the SAP Solution Manager for upgrade project. It has upgrade project plan which defines the activities and helps to organize the testing effort according the phases of upgrade project.

Additionally,SAP also delivers test case templates for SAP ERP enhancement packages which include test case catalog for each new business function included in enhancement packages.