With change and speed being two words in everyone’s “innovation dictionary,” it’s no wonder that there is a sense of urgency in quickly transforming a business and using technology and IT to speed up the process and keep pace with a dynamic business environment.
In the rush to quickly adapt and make changes, there are some processes and considerations that are sometimes overlooked and lead to more difficulties than successes.
The goal, during deployments or upgrades is to mitigate the risk as much as possible and create the changes with little to no disruption, on a budget, and with success.
One of the best ways to do this, and a process that should never be overlooked, is through a well-defined testing strategy implemented through a robust holistic testing framework. In other words, test deployments and upgrades, but ensure the testing process is solid.
So what is testing? It’s somewhat self-explanatory (you know, test it out before it goes live), but it’s really about measuring the software’s ability to run optimally within an IT landscape coupled with user patterns and behaviors. Since IT landscapes can differ from company to company, each situation must be assessed differently and therefore, the testing services will address each on a situational basis.
When designing a strategic, risk-based testing solution, here are a few questions that must be answered:
- Will you be integrating your new software into a single legacy source system or multiple systems?
- Are you deploying standard SAP software or customizing it?
- Will your users be using most functionality in a fairly balanced way or using only certain functions heavily and all at the same time?
- How distributed is your user base?
- How well is your cloud infrastructure able to support the distributed nature of the user base?
After answering these questions (and others), the testing solution can be designed and implemented to ensure the final deployment, that brings the solution live, is successful.
The Global Testing Solutions from SAP brochure outlines more about the process, customization, test model, tools, and more benefits of the testing services - see it on Slideshare here: Testing Services for Innovation Solutions from SAP Services
:: Risk-based testing diagram from the Testing Services for Innovation Solutions brochure. ::
