Getting started with Doctor ZedGe

[Former Member]

The ABAP Test Cockpit is a new powerful enterprise-ready SAP standard tool to perform static program analysis of Custom ABAP Code. The results are fine for developers but for Project Managers, Quality Managers and IT Managers are difficult to be translated into activities.

This guide will explain how Doctor ZedGe can provide more transparency on the quality of your custom ABAP code also introducing some proven concepts related to software quality assurance. It's just a small add-on by Techedge to better present the ATC results.

Thanks to community project abap2xlsx, it creates nice looking MS Excel spreadsheets aggregating the raw data produced by ABAP Test Cockpit and computing additional metrics like Maintainability Index.

Our idea was to simplify the ATC results, that are designed to be used mainly by a developer to adjust the code (and I suggest to use it in your every day development activity), in order to provide an easily readable overview of the system complexity.

We thought about a label, like the one used for the energy class, to be applied to custom code to prove its quality.

In order to achieve this result we designed a MS Excel spreadsheets composed of three sections:

• The Global Score: the label that shown the calculated global score
• The Report Summary: a summary that show ad aggregation of the value contained in the Report Detail section
• The Report Detail: a detailed list of all scanned objects with standard metrics and violations available in three different aggregation level depending on the role of the user

We designed it for Developers and Quality Assurance Managers (QA) but also for Team Leaders and Project Managers (PM), for AMS members and even for SAP Owners.

SAP Owners

During the weekly CAB meeting, SAP Owners will monitor quality of Custom ABAP Code. In case, they can launch new projects to improve it. Periodically they may also want to get a Certification from independent companies.

Team Leaders and Project Managers (PM)

Running Doctor ZedGe against the specific Change Request of their project, Team Leaders and Project managers can get:

• Quantitative analysis with transparency on number of objects  created/changed together with detailed software metrics like (e.g. Lines of code)
• Quality analysis with a clear picture of exceptions

It’s important to underline that information can be obtained at any time and not only during the release of the CR or during Massive Checks performed by the QA.

Team Leaders will normally run the query each day maybe before the SCRUM meeting.

Project Managers will normally run it to prepare the weekly Status Meeting.

AMS members

During the hand-over process (Knowledge Transfer phase), AMS can inspect the CRs the Project Team is going to move to production. Doctor ZedGe highlights objects with higher Maintainability Index and with any exceptions (Violations) and special attention can paid on them.

Quality Assurance Managers (QA)

QAs can weekly analyze the QAS system for example aggregating by Package (formerly known as Development Class).

Developers

As many times as needed, Developers can check compliance to standards. They will avoid Violations by design. They will also produce Elegant Code thanks to the metrics Maintainability Index, Cyclomatic (indicator of complexity) and Comment ratio. A granted good Modularization is a big benefit.

Do not forget to get rid of Business hard coding

Please refer to blog Business hard coding finder - a free Code Inspector check to improve your Custom ABAP Code to evaluate risks introduced by the practice of hard coding strings (literals) corresponding to codes (IDs) related to Organizational Units or Document Types and even Master Data. Examples are Company Codes, Purchase Organizations, Sales Organizations, and Accounting document types.

Installation

Here you can find a form to request the transports of the Doctor ZedGe and the installation instructions.

Technical Requirements

In add to Code Inspector and abap2xlsx, Doctor ZedGe leverages and requires ABAP Test Cockpit that is available since SAP ECC 6.0 EhP6 (SAP BASIS 7.31 SP05).

And finally ...

Here you’ll find the presentation (power point file) held by me at the SAP Inside Track Munich 2014 and if you have the pleasure to participate to the SAP TechEd && d-code 2014 in Las Vegas don't miss the presentation that will be held by ivan.femia.