Testing Services for Innovation Solutions

General BrochureGlobal Testing Solutions from SAP

Testing Services for Innovation SolutionsPredict and Proactively Address Barriers to Solution Success

Table of Contents2 Testing: Key to Managing Risk, Cutting

Costs, and Ensuring Innovation Success

4 Fast,Affordable,Risk-BasedTesting TailoredtoYourBusiness

10 SAPTestModel:IdealforTestingAcrossTraditionalandVirtualEnvironments

13 ToolsthatEmpowerITwithEarly, EmpiricallyBased,PredictiveInsights

14 TheBenefitsofaHolisticApproachtoTesting

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© 2014 SAP AG or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved.

Testing: Key to Managing Risk, Cutting Costs, and Ensuring Innovation Success

To thrive in today’s dynamic business environ-ments, your organization needs to continuously innovate and rapidly adapt to changes – for example, by enhancing existing business applica-tions or developing and implementing new ones. But new software deployments and upgrades can also introduce risk into your organization, which is why you need a well-defined test strategy that is implemented and supported by a robust, holistic testing framework.

When it comes to deploying SAP software, testing isn’t only about debugging or validating integration with other SAP solutions; you’re right to assume we’ve already taken care of this before taking a product to market. Testing is about measuring the software’s ability to run optimally within your company’s unique IT landscape and given your employees’ and clients’ particular behaviors and

usage patterns. The number of variables in these areas can be huge. For example, consider the variability of answers that our customers might provide to the following questions:

• 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 func-tions 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?

These are just a few examples of variables within IT environments that necessitate the strategic, risk-based testing of new or upgraded software before you go live with it.

Given the mission-critical role of SAP® software in driving business innovation, how do you ensure optimal performance of your unique solution landscape? What if you had a way to accurately predict and proactively head off issues such as the perfor-mance bottlenecks that can make or break investment success? This paper ex-plores how you can use risk-based software testing to achieve your goals – and how global testing solutions from SAP can help you do it in a targeted, fast, and affordable way.

An organization’s core business performance shouldn’t suffer during any technical or process change, such as an application implementation or upgrade. The highly secure and mission-critical nature of enterprise application data means that you need to regularly test these applications and related business processes for both functionality and performance. The success of any IT project depends on how smoothly your implementation or upgrade project goes live.

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USINGEMPIRICALEVIDENCETOOPTIMIZEOUTCOMESAt SAP, testing involves running a subset of your real business data – data that aligns with your business blueprint – in a nonproduction environ-ment to reveal exactly where you’ll encounter performance and other issues. Think of it as pre-dictive risk insight for IT professionals. This in-sight is valuable empirical evidence you can use to make informed decisions about how to ensure solution success. For example, you can make proactive, targeted adjustments that will head off these risks and help ensure your business realizes the full, expected return on its software investment. Any decision maker today – regardless of line of business or industry – can benefit from having this kind of predictive insight. IT is no exception. Imagine the power of having:

• A way to safely test your planned strategy, understand its strengths and weaknesses, and make changes to help ensure you will accomplish your mission

• A dashboard to convey predictive insights, including a “heat map” that identifies and prioritizes areas of risk

• A foundation of core assets that can be reused as needed to simulate and monitor risk going forward – faster and with less effort

Testing services from SAP give you the equivalent of this knowledge. They simulate the way in which you would conduct your mission – in this case, by actually running and using the software deployed in your own IT landscape – and see what would actually happen. And based on this knowledge, you can make adjustments that eliminate risks before your project actually goes live.

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With traditional approaches to testing, many tasks involve time-consuming manual effort by skilled quality assurance (QA) engineers. So it’s no surprise that QA teams can find themselves pressed for time, skipping critical tests, and con-cerned about costs. Even when they automate testing activities using traditional record-and- replay tools, QA teams frequently struggle to maintain the necessary scripts. The result: higher costs and a risky testing process.

That’s why SAP offers testing software and ser-vices designed to increase testing efficiency and accuracy at a lower cost. SAP achieves this by:

• Prioritizingthetestscopebasedonactualbusinessrisk:By empowering you to identify the impact of new support and enhancement packages and upgrades, the SAP Solution Manager application management solution enables you to prioritize the test scope based on business risk (in alignment with the business-defined blueprint for the software). As a result, you can better plan testing activities and focus on the key functional areas affected by what’s changed.

• Streamliningtestcreation,execution,andmaintenance: The SAP Test Acceleration and Optimization application automatically generates components for SAP user interface–based transactions and uploads them for execution to test automation tools. This promotes consis-tent, repeatable, automated processes for test-ing activities. You can then run these test cases and execute them on end-to-end business pro-cesses, increasing testing productivity.

• Identifyingimpactedtestcasesandcompo-nentsearly: Tight integration with SAP Solution Manager helps identify test cases and compo-nents impacted by changes in the IT landscape. Because SAP Test Acceleration and Optimization is integrated with SAP Solution Manager and the SAP Quality Center application by HP, QA teams can prepare and execute tests more quickly. Early detection of defects and issues allows you to remediate them at exponentially cheaper costs compared later in production.

• Reusing test cases: SAP Test Acceleration and Optimization creates modular test cases made up of components. These components can be reused, as needed, to avoid rewriting the same scripts for future tests. The components can be tracked to specific transactions and business procedures and reused to test multiple process-es and scenarios in your business blueprint. As a result, you can typically execute 10 to 50 times more tests using the same components.

Fast, Affordable, Risk-Based Testing Tailored to Your Business

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• Improvingtestmanagement:SAP has stan-dardized its approach to quality control by using tools, technology, and supporting best practice–based test processes. This approach works for testing everything from basic trans-action functionality to process performance in the cloud. This standard test approach helps you organize activities, leverage automation wherever possible, and store and track results on a single platform where accumulated testing knowledge is accessible to all. All test results are stored in SAP Quality Center.

• Supportingtheentiretestprocess: Using SAP Test Acceleration and Optimization, SAP Solution Manager, and SAP Test Data Migration Server software, SAP Quality Center supports the entire testing process. That means your QA teams are supported in an integrated manner, all the way from developing the application blueprint to importing changes to the produc-tion system.

Because SAP services and solutions for testing help you do more with less, you can always en-sure that your business applications perform optimally while minimizing the risks associated with outages and sluggish performance.

KEYPRINCIPLESOFSAP’SGLOBALTESTINGAPPROACHThe global testing solutions team from SAP helps customers in all sectors around the world to plan and execute functional and nonfunctional testing (including performance and end-to-end testing) using the SAP testing approach. This approach is integrated into the ASAP® methodology (see sidebar) and provides industry-leading practices for all implementations of SAP solutions, includ-ing cloud and innovative technologies like the SAP HANA® platform.

The SAP testing approach starts with the assump-tion that every implementation of SAP software should be accompanied by a robust, comprehensive regression-testing pack, including processes that traverse the cloud. This end-to-end testing pack is used to confirm that no major flaws resulting from new software or an upgrade, patch, or enhancement will be released into critical SAP transactions and processes or impact performance.

You can also add patches, provided by SAP, so that your test cases remain valid. Using the SAP® Test Acceleration and Optimization application in combination with the SAP Quality Center application by HP, you can compose and execute automated business process tests in SAP software development and test systems.

TheASAP®MethodologyThe proprietary ASAP® methodology from SAP has served as the application management and governance framework for implementations of SAP solutions for over 50 years. The framework comprises four phases: project preparation, blueprint, realization, and final preparation.

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Equally important, the testing approach is based on the following guiding principles:

• Keep the testing independent • Test according to business risk • Lay a solid test foundation early • Automate testing and its management for maximum efficiency

• Use a standardized approach and framework for testing across all environments and technologies

• Leave customers empowered

The following sections explore these principles in more detail.

KeeptheTestingIndependentTesting should be conducted independently of development and configuration activities to avoid less reliable testing along the “happy path” – the path along which developers and configurators have worked from their perspective and goals to achieve the desired functionality. It’s good to note that this is rarely the path an actual user would take when using the functionality. As

a result, to reflect this reality, the testing scope and approach should be defined and driven by the daily demands of the business – with priority business processes forming the backbone of testing requirements. This approach helps en-sure that the team of SAP experts tests the SAP software in the same way your business users work with the system as part of their daily tasks. SAP refers to this approach as “business process testing.” In other words, it’s not just the code that is tested.

TestAccordingtoBusinessRiskTest coverage should be parameterized accord-ing to the risks and priorities that the business determines, in alignment with blueprinted busi-ness scenarios, processes, process steps, and transactions of your SAP solutions (see levels 1 through 4, as shown in Figure 1). The goal is to focus testing on the most risk-exposed areas of the blueprint, as this ensures that testing is both efficient (via more reusability of the test scripts) and effective (because it is well targeted).

Figure1:TestComponents(Levels1–4)AreDerivedfromBusinessBlueprints

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Components are created on a screen, tab, or business-user process level to maximize reusability and reduce maintenance costs.

Acceleration opportunities:

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The depth to which SAP testing teams test your software depends on the areas of business risk identified and SAP’s knowledge of risk in similar businesses using the same software. In some cases, it makes the most sense to test only a specific set of transactions. In other cases, you may determine that you need to do broad-based testing of all functionality for an SAP application.

To identify business risk, the SAP testing teams: • First look at your business blueprint for your SAP software systems. Your business defines the business blueprint using the L1–L4 struc-ture illustrated in Figure 1, so it naturally reflects the business processes and transactions that are the most important to your organization. SAP testing teams use the blueprints to assess what to test and automate.

• Also consider other parameters for risk, such as transaction utilization. By using SAP Solution Manager, they can run reports that identify most-used transactions. These highly used transactions should be tested every time change is introduced into your SAP software ecosystem. The tests should also be part of a regression test pack for automation.

• Leverage their extensive knowledge about blue-print structures and how they typically operate within companies in different industries. For example, they can access real-world data (such as SAP support messages) and metrics from real customers using the same software your business is deploying. The result is a solid base of empirical data about different software modules, their respective blueprints, and how companies like yours have tested the software in the past.

Figure2:IncorporatingRiskParametersintoRisk-BasedTestPlans

Risk-basedtesting

Regressionsuiteoftestcasescoveringkeyscenarioswithprioritizationperrisk-basedtesting

Prioritizedtestcasescoveringcorefunctionalityandhighestriskprocesstobeexecutedforeachupgrade

Messages • Analyze SAP support messages • Identify key potential failure points and test cases for same

Usagepattern • Analyze utilization of blueprint • Identify test cases for high usage area

Proactive reuse • Analyze new functionalities and process impacts in future releases • Create or reuse test cases

Test coverage aligned with system risk (severity) and business impact (priority)

Effective reuse of test case components

• Plan, prioritize, and test based on risk of functional fail-ure or performance deficiency and the impact to project and enterprise

• Measurebyexposure,impact,andlikelihoodoffailurewithintheSAP®softwareecosystem

• Business blueprint prioritization and alignment for effec-tive requirements verification and traceability

• Compositionoftestcasescoveringprocessesthatareprioritizedinblueprintandrequirements

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LayaSolidTestFoundationEarlyAs early as the blueprinting phase, and prior to realization, testing needs to be in the minds of the project planners, stakeholders, practitioners, and key decision makers. First, testing early in the deployment process also enables early de-tection of defects and issues where they can be remediated at far less cost than if they are identi-fied close to, or in, the production phase. And second, not only does it keep everybody on their toes (because they know that testing is looming), but it also enables the early construction of test assets and an agreed-upon approach.

Test planning provides early insight and verifica-tion of the process infrastructure that will be tested, as well as the transactions and business process procedures. These components should be tested first during unit testing. Test planning should include building out the test cases for functionality and performance (leveraging the foundational basis set in unit testing).

You should aim to use this early start in testing to maximum effect. For example, it is important to test throughout the deployment lifecycle. The testing model from SAP (see Figure 2) resumes in the realization phase of a typical project based on either the ASAP methodology or some other approach based on Information Technology Infra-structure Library (ITIL) standards. This phase spans the handoff from unit testing to string test-ing. Following string testing, the team conducts integration testing, building out test cases and assets into more end-to-end–integrated test cases and using test case components coupled and pieced together as required.

This integration testing continues through to the going-live phase, when regression testing is built out of the integration testing foundation to help ensure that all new functionality does not negatively impact existing functionality.

Professional software testers bring the perspective of business users to the testing process. Whereas developers focus on testing functionality, business users are more concerned about how well the pro-cesses and scenarios they use daily are captured in end-to-end test cases.

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AutomateTestingandTestManagementforMaximumEfficiencyThe test foundation should be primed for auto-mation via the use of componentized test cases that are mapped to business requirements, as specified in the business blueprint. Whether they cover transactions, processes, or scenarios, these test cases are then ready for scripting. The goal is to get the highest yield from automated test components by focusing on the most heavily used transactions, processes, and scenarios in the business blueprint. By automating the testing for the most important core functionality, you are also automating what will be the basis of the regression test pack for all SAP migrations, trans-ports, and upgrades.

LeaveCustomersEducatedandEmpoweredTesting engagements with SAP don’t just address an immediate testing need. They have long-lasting benefits for your enterprise. The goals of any engagement include sharing industry-leading test practices and knowledge with your enter-prise, as well as empowering your staff to lever-age this knowledge through the use of powerful tools and processes in the future.

To this end, SAP testing experts take your internal IT staff through a series of rigorous knowledge transfer sessions that cover both traditional and – since more processes are moving to the cloud and must also be tested properly – virtual de-ployments. The SAP experts also mentor your staff through various “day-in-the-life” and “train-the-trainer” sessions. As a result, your internal IT teams develop expert capabilities for testing SAP software – expertise you can even use to create a center of excellence that offers shared services such as performance validations.


Test management, which enables reporting and setup, should be conducted through the integration of the test foundation with the blueprint in the testing tools.

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SAP Test Model: Ideal for Testing Across Traditional and Virtual Environments

As your enterprise moves into the cloud and uses SAP HANA to enable lightning-fast connections with end users, the global testing solutions group from SAP can help ensure that you realize ex-pected benefits from these “disruptive,” transfor-mative technologies. Expert testing is the key to avoiding issues with data integrity, functionality, and system performance – issues that can threaten business value.

Using a standardized and integrated testing framework, SAP experts provide the foundation required for identifying, understanding, and deploying SAP software in both traditional and virtualized environments. This flexible framework works equally well when testing solutions on a physically centralized, hardwired, and localized SAP software implementation or a virtual imple-mentation in the cloud.


Because the approach the SAP testing teams take is iterative and based on ITIL standards, the SAP experts simply need to integrate the approach into the implementation discipline in the virtual environment. Cloud deployments require testers to verify that all end-to-end scenarios work prop-erly as they traverse source technology like data warehouses or in-house client systems and ser-vice an increasingly distributed user base using traditional and mobile devices. At the same time, testers need to verify that these scenarios per-form at expected speeds – especially when SAP solutions leverage SAP HANA. SAP testing teams measure performance improvements and track functionality; this enables more overall planning for predictive technology. It also means the fast-est possible resolution when issues arise.

To be efficient and cost-effective, SAP testing teams intentionally don’t test everything. They focus on where there’s risk to your business. As a result, it’s critical that, as the experts define the scope of test coverage, they address all key areas of risk. Testing always covers basic software functionality (which is now portable to virtual environments). So scoping involves identifying and testing the high-use transactions, business process procedures, L2 and L3 process steps and processes, and L1 sce-narios that are most important for your business. The construction and execution of actual test cas-es remains the same, regardless of whether SAP® software is running in a traditional or virtual environment.

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Figure 3 illustrates this testing model, which is applicable to any implementation, including vir-tualized environments. The level of detail in each task box varies with the requirements of different deployments. The test tasks, listed in the maroon boxes, are aligned with the gray boxes along the top, which match the ASAP methodology used for most implementations of SAP software.

UNIT TESTINGUnit testing validates that individual functions are configured and developed to appropriately translate technical and functional requirements.

AN ASAP-BASEDTESTINGMODELWITHFIVEPHASESThe ASAP-based test model encompasses five phases of testing:1. Unit testing2. Business process (string) testing3. Scenario integration testing4. Performance testing5. User acceptance testing

Each type of testing is performed on the SAP solution landscape, but with different pass/fail criteria and, in some cases, even by different test teams.

Figure3:ASAPTestingModel

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PERFORMANCETESTINGPerformance testing determines the performance of an SAP application and related hardware. This type of testing uses an automated tool to simu-late a representative user load, and it measures system resources and response times. This testing includes the baseline of the server and response times. Note that:

• Volumetesting identifies the peak transactional load that the database can handle by using representative loads (for example, by creating transactions versus updating existing transactions).

• Stress testing includes scenarios that simulate the peak loads, including concurrent connected users, synchronizing remote users, and concur-rent execution of other production jobs (for instance, interfaces).

USER ACCEPTANCE TESTINGUser acceptance testing (UAT) demonstrates whether or not the system is functioning as designed. Users test the complete, end-to-end business processes to verify that the implemented solution performs the intended functions and satisfies business requirements. As the last test cycle in an SAP software implementation, UAT is an essential part of gaining end-user acceptance. This testing occurs at the end of the realization phase, following the cycles of integration testing. This approach ensures that the project team has tested the system thoroughly and that the system is ready to be released to the end-user community.

This includes testing of individual enterprise resource planning (ERP) transactions, business process procedures, configuration transactions, development objects (reports, interfaces, conver-sions, extensions, forms, and workflow [RICE-FW]). and manual business process steps associ-ated with business transactions.

BUSINESSPROCESS(ORSTRING)TESTINGBusiness process (or string) testing validates full operability of interconnected functions, methods, or objects within the functional areas of an SAP solution (for example, sales). This type of testing includes:

• Logically related activities or business process steps that form a defined business process

• Business processes that cross functional areas (for example, sales and finance)

SCENARIO(ORINTEGRATION)TESTINGScenario (or integration) testing validates a set of business processes that define a business scenario in a comprehensive and self-contained manner on a macro level.

SAP recommends doing integration testing in two or more iterations. The initial iteration concentrates on testing all important business processes within the SAP components of the implemented solution, starting with touch-point scenarios and ending with end-to-end scenarios. The next (and in most cases, final) iteration fo-cuses on cross-functional business scenarios with non-SAP systems and applications, custom development objects, converted data, and solu-tion security.

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PROACTIVEENTERPRISEANDPROJECTRISKREPORTINGProject-level reporting capabilities with this configuration are as dynamic as they are com-prehensive for both test (risk) coverage and for root cause analysis in triage activities for defects. As a result, identifying risk and fixing it at the root is a clear and efficient process.

SAP consultants help your staff become familiar with this process. This knowledge transfer helps enable test leads to mitigate risk in a much more visible way and ensure that all major system components, as well as requirements, have been addressed for coverage and traceability in the overall test plan.

The objectives of testing are to ensure the SAP solution landscape meets all the business requirements in the project’s scope, and that the solutions meet technical requirements and service levels for application response time, throughput, and infrastructure performance at typical production loads.

As you go through these steps, the SAP experts leverage tools to give you fast access to predic-tive risk insights – insights you can use to head off issues before you go live with new or updated SAP software. The visual dashboards, reports, and other interfaces effectively create a mission control center that centralizes and prioritizes all risk-related information pertaining to a given software deployment. It’s like having a personal-ized “heat map” that you can use proactively to avoid problems.

ANINTERFACETODRIVERISKMITIGATIONANDTEST MANAGEMENTThe right test management tool can enable full traceability between requirements and test cases. Leading vendors such as HP, IBM, and Worksoft have developed powerful test management tools that work well with SAP Solution Manager. This enables traceability by integrating business blueprints and test requirements. This integra-tion also enables testers to dynamically update test requirements for your test management tool.

SAP Solution Manager can also be used to run utilization reports on your business blueprint. Utilization data and other metrics should be dynamically reflected in your test management tool so you can quickly develop test plans and keep them aligned with how users are actually using the software and the areas of risk in your blueprint. This approach points to where you need to test and where you can automate testing.

Tools that Empower IT with Early, Empirically Based, Predictive Insights

The interactive way in which the SAP® Solution Manager application management solution integrates blueprints with test requirements is lean, agile, and configurable. As you deploy new releases and upgrades of SAP solutions, you can scale SAP Solution Manager with ease to meet new test requirements.

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CMP29340(14/01)© 2014 SAP AG or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved.

SAP upgrade, transport, migration, or even maintenance task. Any risk will be reflected as a test requirement and prompt you to develop a script and test case, if needed.

• Efficient – Components of testing are tracked back to your business blueprint, and the core functionality of your SAP solution landscape can easily be reused in more test cases, as ap-propriate. Test cases that get reused are candi-dates for test automation, which saves time and drives down the cost of testing.

• Repeatable – Reusing components that are tracked back to the same business blueprint drives repeatability in testing at an operational execution level. Repeatability means that testers can hold more variables constant, which in turn increases test control while minimizing effort and cost. Repeatability is also driven by SAP’s testing methodology, which focuses on inte-grating testing with the overall application life-cycle governance. This means testing is consid-ered early in the application lifecycle so that testing teams can collect and verify business process requirements and define the best testing strategy. This approach not only helps testers detect defects early in a deployment but also lay the foundation for fast, robust, and repeatable testing over time.

FINDOUTMORETo learn more about how global testing solutions from SAP can help your business, visit us on the Web at www.sap.com/services.

The global testing services team and integrated testing tools from SAP can help you:

• Acceleratecycletimeforapplicationrelease with a regression test capability that includes automation for faster testing

• Mitigateriskforyourbusinessapplications with test coverage that is targeted at the highest-risk areas of your business blueprint

• Deliverapositiveexperienceforendusers by validating tests to help ensure user experiences are accounted for in test cases

• Promotecompany-wide,standard,central-ized testing across all projects and methodolo-gies, regardless of whether or not SAP solutions are deployed traditionally or in the cloud

• Increasethequalityoftesting via cross-project sharing of defects, requirements, processes, and tests through a single, unified platform

The benefits of testing services from SAP are far-reaching because they not only address risk within software deployment projects but also educate and empower your IT staff to incorporate testing into the product lifecycle management process for SAP solutions. They will gain the knowledge and tools to execute holistic testing independently over the longer term. These bene-fits make testing:

• Sustainable – Integrated tools lay the founda-tion for SAP’s risk-based testing approach. By integrating your business blueprint with test requirements, you can understand the impact on the blueprint – and thus on business user behavior – every time you are faced with an

The Benefits of a Holistic Approach to Testing

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