ANST can help in effective test preparation

ANST – Automated Notes Search Tool, is a powerful tool to help searching SAP notes for issues you encounter in your SAP system. As this tool is part of SAP standard applications now and has been of great use for end customers, partners & development teams, in this blog I am exploring the possibilities of using it for Quality engineers from testing point of view.

Before doing any scenario testing & test automation, it is most important to ensure that the required customizing is correct & complete to support the execution of test case. This tool can be of great help in ensuring the same & achieving more effective testing.

Lets start from the point when we design a test case , its very important to define the prerequisite steps  including the required customizing correctly here. Often, one way of finding important customizing tables involved in process testing is through development colleagues/application responsible, however in that case we are dependent on correctness & completeness of the information provided.

Here is another way to do it using ANST, to find the right tables/views ensuring all customization are done in test automation prior to scenario testing. ANST has got capability to give all the tables which are used in a particular test execution. Before test automation, to get maximum coverage of tables which may impact the test execution, manually perform each test step while using ANST. The trace will capture all the table from different components  during the test execution.After capturing all the tables , you can select the area you want to test/automate  and from there you can navigate to corresponding tables/view.

With this, now you can ensure to  include all of the required customization in your automation script to avoid any customization errors during test execution. This tool offers excellent capability of getting all the customizing tables in one place for a scenario or transaction which is to be tested.

Lets do this with a simple scenario where user wants to create a warranty claim using transaction WTY:

Steps :

Login to test system and start the transaction ANST. Enter The transaction you are testing and Description .

I suggest you to give a meaningful description as this will help to search the trace later if needed.

After executing , tool will take you to the transaction screen. Enter the necessary parameters & perform the transaction.

On completion of transaction, click on customizing tables button on below screen.

On below screen, it will show all the tables which are touched upon during this test.There are component specific table lists as well and Important tables can be scanned for the data checks.

You can double click on a particular table to navigate to the details of table. With this analysis, you can decide to include which all customizing steps should be included as prerequisite steps in the test automation script for this transaction.

You can check the trace later too by opening it with the description saved earlier, as below:

Hope this will help in designing automated tests better. If you want to know more about ANST, you can refer to some of the other blogs on this:

What is ANST….and why aren’t you using it?

The power of tools – How ANST can help you to solve billing problems yourself!