SAP Retrofit: When to start with automated testing?
How risk-based testing supports your quality assurance
November 4 2022 | Read time: 4 min
How can you make sure that you are working in a safe and secure mode with risk-based testing?
We have already talked about how changes in the SAP ecosystem can be managed by SAP Retrofit: In using the “maintenance track” as well as the “project track”, you can avoid risks in upgrading your systems. However, the changes in your SAP System – either with SAP Retrofit transport* or retrofitted custom functionalities – must be quality checked. To do so, a lot of companies are relying on a huge amount of manual testing efforts. Meaning the SAP Key-Users have to test a flood of regression tests. Even though they play an extremely important role during the User-Acceptance-Testing (UAT) phase and should only focus on the most crucial processes.
Testing right from the start or is it enough if you do it in the end?
To overcome that issue you can introduce automated testing in combination with a risk-based testing approach. And the best time to do so is not at the end or during your S/4 HANA migration - but directly in parallel to the retrofit of your custom functionalities.
By doing so, you can identify your most important and risky business processes, start with the retrofit and implement automated tests already during this early stage. This will sequentially build up your regression test portfolio and reduce the time spent and efforts needed by your key users. This enables you to look forward to an easily manageable and plannable S/4 HANA migration**. You can now benefit from all the collected knowledge during the retrofit phase as preparation for your S/4 HANA migration** and plan your automated tests, executions, and UATs more precisely.
The built-up regression test portfolio is ready to go and is reducing the workload of your SAP key users.
Which test cases should you tackle first?
The good news is that if you do it right, you can get 80 percent risk coverage with 20 percent of the test cases. To decide which test scenarios you should prioritize, you first have to assess the business risks. To do so, we will have a look at the likeliness and the impact.
As you can see, you can get the most out of your testing if you take on the areas with high business risk impact and high-risk probability. And after that, you can work your way to through the high-risk impact with low business-risk cases.
With our approach, you will:
- Reduce the workload of your SAP key users
- Take on the tests that contribute the most to your overall risk coverage
- Know exactly what your test status is – anytime
How can you start your SAP Retrofit?
If you think that this is the way to go for your project, but don’t quite know where to start with the practical implementation, we offer you our support: Our SAP Quality Assurance Assessment is tailored to the needs of your specific SAP IT landscape, upgrades, retrofits, and migrations, because we do not believe in the one fits all-approach for test strategies and test automation. Thus before starting with automation, our experts assess your SAP landscape, architecture, value streams, tech stack, delivery processes, and current state of your application, upgrade or migrations as well as all other applications necessary in the process.
For the assessment, our test automation maturity matrix will be used to define the maturity of the domain in different categories (architecture, delivery process, test portfolio, test data, and automation capabilities). Based on the assessment, the test strategy and approach will be defined and planned for your specific needs.
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