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sonalkumar
Advisor
Advisor

Automate Application Testing

Improve Software Quality and Reduce Testing Costs

Thriving in today’s dynamic business environments requires organizations to continuously innovate and rapidly adapt to changes. Many do so by enhancing existing business applications or developing and implementing new ones. To help ensure high quality and minimal business and IT risk, companies must test these changes to the IT landscape before putting them into production mode. But because so many testing tasks require manual effort, quality assurance (QA) teams find themselves pressed for time and struggle to keep costs low. To stay on schedule and within budget, QA teams are often forced to delay a release or to skip critical tests. Even when organizations automate testing activities using traditional record-and-replay tools, they frequently struggle to maintain the necessary scripts. Plus skilled quality engineers are required to develop and update the tests. The result is higher costs and a risky testing process.

Fortunately, SAP offers quality and performance testing software designed to help you increase testing efficiency and accuracy at a lower cost. With the ability to do more with less, your testing teams will be able to meet testing needs – helping to ensure that your business applications perform optimally while minimizing the business risks associated with outages and sluggish performance. A key part of this software is the SAP® Test Acceleration and Optimization application, which lets you automate your business process tests.

Streamline Test Creation and Maintenance

SAP Test Acceleration and Optimization enables you to automate your business process tests by automatically generating draft test cases and test components for SAP user interface–based transactions and uploading them to the SAP Quality Center application by HP for execution. Because the application creates modular test cases using test components instead of command lines, you can easily reuse tests with updated data input and readily maintain them when test cases are damaged due to functional changes. This functionality is straightforward and cost-effective to maintain, even when screens, flows, or service packages change. You can also add patches, provided by SAP, so that your test cases remain valid.

Using SAP Test Acceleration and Optimization in combination with SAP Quality Center – a Web-based application that supports consistent, repeatable, automated processes for critical testing activities – you can compose and execute automated business process tests in SAP software development and test systems. These automated test cases can then be run and executed on end-to-end business processes, helping to increase testing productivity. Plus, you can store all test results in SAP Quality Center. Moreover, tight integration with the SAP Solution Manager application management solution helps in identifying the impacted test cases and components when there are changes in the IT landscape.

Because SAP Test Acceleration and Optimization is natively integrated with SAP Quality Center and SAP Solution Manager, your QA team can prepare and execute tests more quickly. As a result, it’s easier for them to meet demand and help ensure high levels of quality.

Improve Test Management

To improve testing efficiency while helping to ensure higher levels of quality, your QA teams need to standardize their approach to quality management. This requires tools, technology, and best-practice test processes that help them organize their activities, leverage automation wherever possible, and store and track results on a single platform where accumulated testing knowledge is accessible to all.

SAP Solution Manager and SAP Quality Center can help. Enabling comprehensive and accurate testing, this software minimizes the risk and uncertainty associated with new implementations, upgrades, or modifications.

When combined with SAP Test Acceleration and Optimization, SAP Solution Manager, and SAP Test Data Migration Server software, SAP Quality Center supports the entire testing process (see Figure 1). That means your QA teams are supported in an integrated manner, all the way from developing the application blueprint to importing changes to the production system.

Minimize Business Risk

Like many organizations, yours may be reluctant to make changes to your production systems because you lack visibility into the impact of these changes on important business processes. Plus you probably don’t have time to test every aspect of your applications before deploying these changes. Ideally, you want to test only those business processes and scenarios that are impacted by a particular change. However, carrying out such an analysis often involves a lengthy and error-prone process of reviewing multiple SAP software–based transactions and exporting data into a stand-alone evaluation tool.

 By empowering you to identify the impact of new support and enhancement packages or upgrades, SAP Solution Manager enables you to prioritize the test scope based on business risk. As a result, you can better plan testing activities and focus on those areas affected by the new or changed application. Just as important, by identifying the business risk of your planned changes, you can better align your IT organization with your business.

Designed for Quality Engineers and Business Process Experts

Using SAP Test Acceleration and Optimization in combination with SAP Quality Center, you can modify, compose, and execute automated business process tests in SAP software development and test systems. The application also provides a lot of reusable library components, which could be used for test composition.

SAP Test Acceleration and Optimization helps you change the testing paradigm from manual testing to testing by composition, thereby reducing the costs and risks for testing SAP solutions. The benefits include reduced effort for maintaining automated business process tests, reduced risk due to better testing coverage, and increased capacity to absorb and manage change. Tight integration with SAP Solution Manager enables you to report on impacted test cases and components due to changes in your IT landscape.

Tap Into the Advantages of Automated Testing

SAP Test Acceleration and Optimization helps you quickly create and efficiently maintain test cases, which leads to higher test coverage at much lower cost compared to manual testing across shorter testing cycles (see Figure 2). Just as important, the efficiencies can help minimize the risk of outages and other problems caused by poor testing.

You’ll likely realize faster return on investment for the SAP Test Acceleration and Optimization application than with traditional automation. That’s because the test cases generated by the application are easier to maintain due to their modular nature. Plus it takes little effort to execute the automated scripts provided by SAP Test Acceleration and Optimization, leading to savings in resource utilization.

Key Features

• Test automation – Automatically generate draft test cases and test components for SAP user interface–based transactions

• Modular test cases – More easily reuse a test with updated data input and maintain tests when test cases are damaged due to functional changes

• Reusable library components – Simplify and streamline test composition

• Quality management standardization – Organize activities, leverage automation
wherever possible, and store and track results with SAP Quality Center

• Reports – Gain insight into impacted test cases and components due to changes in your IT landscape through tight integration with SAP Solution Manager

Business Benefits

• Increase test productivity by running and executing automated test cases on end-to-end business processes

• Reduce effort and risk by automating business process testing

• Enable higher test coverage at much lower cost compared to manual testing across shorter testing cycles

• Gain efficiencies that help minimize the risk of outages and other problems caused by poor testing

ROI on SAP TAO

 

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