How to Ensure Safe SAP Change!

Organizations don’t just demand higher volumes of SAP change. They also expect reliable and safe SAP change that won’t break in production.

Our last blog highlighted that you could move large volumes of change with Rev-Trac’s Release Management Workbench (RMW). However, if the quality of SAP changes is poor, the possibility of interruptions to your business is more significant.

Quality with release management

At the most fundamental level, Rev-Trac ensures that every change is linked to a Rev-Trac Request. This enforcement is the first level of quality assurance.

After the change is associated with a Request, it is subject to approvals workflows that include QA and Testing, at a minimum. Rev-Trac bi-directionally integrates with best of breed DevOps tools – using secure REST APIs – to enhance the quality of your SAP changes.

The tools Rev-Trac can integrate with include automated solutions, for instance, Tricentis and Worksoft, and impact analysis technologies such as LiveCompare. As well as code checking solutions like SAP’s ATC (ABAP Test Cockpit) and Onapsis Code Profiler.

Consider a Rev-Trac and Tricentis integration, for example. Here, Rev-Trac enforces your approval process and calls Tricentis to begin functional/regression testing at the appropriate stage.

As a result of Rev-Trac’s integration capabilities, legacy tools that your organization invested in are fully used in the change management process, assuring continued ROI on the purchase.

Improve quality with safety checks

While integration certainly enhances the quality of SAP change, it is not the only functionality available to SAP IT teams at the release level. Rev-Trac also incorporates a range of powerful safety checks that can prevent overtakes, overwrites, and sequencing issues. These safety checks give you the confidence that quality has been taken care of when migrating releases.

The safety checks include:

• • Overtake and Overwrite Protection System (OOPS): This check analyzes the sequence of the transports in the request, avoiding potential deployment of untested changes and more dangerous downgrade situations.
  • Peripheral Object Dependency System (PODS): Discover other objects that may have a dependency on objects included in the release. As a result, you can avoid potential generation and bad return code situations in the target systems.
  • Code Impact Scoring System (CISS): Get a score that highlights the relative importance or risk of the code depending on how often the code is called and used in the target production system.
  • Dependency Check: This check is different to PODS. It manually looks at objects specifically included in the release and if they have any dependencies that were set by a user.
  • In-flight Parallel Check: Looks for any parallel development of objects included in the release.

Consider the example below:

When you click on the three dots within a panel of a release — 1000002071, for example – you are presented with a submenu that lists a series of safety checks.

The safety checks run across the 3 (in this example) requests included in the release. However, there is no upper limit to the number of requests in a Rev-Trac release.

SAP IT teams can run the safety check at an individual request level. So, even if a request is part of a larger release, it can be isolated, and the various tests run against it.

All checks run automatically and are available out-of-the-box, underpinning the importance that Rev-Trac puts on quality and safe SAP change.

Whether moving a single change or an entire release, minimizing disruptions to your SAP systems is the first step to a successful business.

For more information on how Rev-Trac can help enhance quality – whether moving one SAP change or an entire release – feel free to contact one of our in-house experts.