Process Integration test tool shipped with SAP Process Orchestration

Based on your feedback that we have received over the years that there is a need for a tool that helps to setup and run automated integration tests, we picked up on this topic last year, and finally were able to ship such a tool as part of the 7.5 SP14 delivery of SAP Process Orchestration. I would like to highlight especially the International Focus Group for Integration and its annual surveys that clearly addressed this need as one of the top 10 requirements. This helps us a lot to prioritize our activities, so big thank you to all the people managing the user groups (and btw they do it in their spare time), and also to our customers and partners who have contributed.

Valuable feedback via Customer Engagement Initiative

You may have been able to take a glimpse at the tool already at last year’s SAP Teched or when attending the DSAG event in Leipzig. Though at a very early stage of development at that point of time, we conducted influence sessions at those events to collect your feedback. Furthermore, we have run a Customer Engagement Initiative project last year where we discussed the concepts and features in detail; in a workshop the participants were able to get their hands dirty and hence were able to provide indeed very valuable input which helped to shape the product and to define our backlog for further enhancements.

So, why is such a test tool so important?

For many of our customers if not all of them a middleware such as SAP Process Integration/SAP Process Orchestration can be seen as a core component in our customer’s system landscapes. A downtime of SAP Process Orchestration would have a major impact on most of – if not all – business processes, so uptime of the integration platform is crucial. The technical downtime during a planned software update or upgrade can be reduced by applying the near Zero Downtime Maintenance (nZDM) approach for instance. This however does not reduce the business downtime which in most cases by far goes beyond the technical downtime. During the business downtime, the business needs to test their business scenarios to ensure that no regression have been introduced. Besides this, another use case would be the migration from SAP Process Integration to SAP Process Orchestration where even the configuration needs to be changed which requires extensive testing of the business scenarios on the new integration landscape.

Test tool at a glance

Those use cases are addressed with the test tool. The test tool covers the maintenance and life-cycle of test cases, the collection of test data, the injection of test messages, test result statistics as well as the possibility to compare the outcome of the test run with the expected result. You can setup automated tests for process integration scenarios whereas successfully processed messages are extracted from the runtime of an SAP Process Integration/SAP Process Orchestration system. Those messages are stored in the test tool system’s data base and can later be replayed on a different system. The replayed messages are gathered from the target system after the run, and the results can be compared with the reference message from the source system. For more details, see the documentation at the SAP Help Portal.

Where can I find out more?

For a detailed description of the test tool including concept, system prerequisites, initial setup, etc., please refer to the SAP Process Integration Test Tool – First Steps blog.

In order to learn how to setup a test case and test run from end-to-end, check out the following blog at SAP Process Integration Test Tool – Create and execute a test case.

Check out this blog about latest features that we have shipped with release 7.5 SP15.

Further increments such as action log, automatic creation of xpath exemptions, and support of test suites have been shipped with 7.5 SP16, see this blog.

With 7.5 SP17, we support scheduling of test cases and test suites and have provided a SAP UI5 user interface, see this blog.

In 7.5 SP18, support for alerts, where-used and a configuration view has been added, see the following blog.

Check out the latest enhancements which have been shipped with 7.5 SP19 at the following blog.