Exploring Tricentis Tosca’s Cloud Deployment: A New Approach to Automation in Testing

Software development has become complicated as businesses build faster, deploy constantly, and stitch together applications across clouds, devices, and APIs. Trying to keep pace with testing using older methods can be chaotic and drain the joy out of building cool stuff. Testing solutions must, therefore, be adaptable, scalable, and integrated into the contemporary development lifecycle, like Tricentis Tosca (also known as SAP Enterprise Continuous Testing).

Addressing Today’s Testing Challenges

In April, Tricentis unveiled the Tosca Cloud Spring 25 release, which adds more muscle to its testing and cloud capabilities. During a recent webinar,  Tricentis’s Solution Architects provided insights into the new features of Tosca, which address the testing challenges developers face today.

They highlighted that by migrating its established capabilities to a cloud-native Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, Tosca aims to enhance accessibility, streamline deployment, and reduce the overhead associated with managing local testing infrastructure. This transition to cloud inherently facilitates easier onboarding and provides teams with immediate access to testing resources, a critical factor for organizations operating in dynamic environments.

A New Approach to Automation

Tosca’s model-based test automation approach involves creating abstract, visual models of the application under test. These are the foundations for designing test cases. Unlike traditional scripting methods, this approach enables the creation of resilient automated tests that are less susceptible to minor changes in the application’s user interface or underlying code.

The codeless nature of the test authoring process broadens participation, allowing subject matter experts and business analysts, who may not have extensive programming backgrounds, to contribute effectively to test automation efforts. This increases collaboration and leverages diverse knowledge within the quality assurance process.

Redefining Enterprise Testing

Tosca’s cloud execution engine facilitates highly scalable and parallel test runs across distributed environments. This significantly accelerates feedback cycles in CI/CD pipelines. Additionally, with its integrated test data management capabilities, Tosca removes the common difficulty of obtaining and managing appropriate data for testing scenarios. It also illustrated the platform’s ability to perform end-to-end testing across various technologies, including web, API, mobile, and packaged applications.

Cloud and AI Capabilities in Testing

Recent advancements, such as the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI), are also notable features of the new release. They include AI-powered assistants, such as Tosca Copilot, which is designed to enhance productivity in areas like test case generation, object recognition, and test maintenance. These features position AI as a tool to augment human testers rather than replace them.

The adoption of a cloud-native platform also inherently improves collaboration and provides centralized visibility. Teams can share test assets more readily, and stakeholders can access real-time dashboards and reporting, fostering a more connected and transparent quality assurance process across the organization.

What This Means for SAPinsiders

Testing trends point to AI-powered automation gaining momentum. According to SAPinsider research, the importance of process automation in organizational strategies is increasing, with 54% of respondents considering it ‘Extremely Important’ in 2024, up from 40% in 2023. This trend underscores the necessity of robust automation as organizations navigate complex SAP landscapes and initiatives like the ongoing shift to SAP S/4HANA, which over half of customers have yet to complete as the 2027 maintenance deadline approaches. Market trends also indicate that the global AI-enabled testing market will grow substantially, reflecting the need for smarter, more efficient ways to manage quality in enterprise applications.

Tosca’s cloud capabilities are directly applicable to common SAP testing use cases. This includes validating critical end-to-end business processes like Order-to-Cash (O2C), which spans modules from sales order entry through delivery, billing, financial postings, and Procure-to-Pay (P2P). The capabilities include testing purchase requisitions, purchase orders, goods receipt, and invoice verification within SAP modules and potentially integrating with external supplier portals or financial systems via APIs. The platform facilitates accelerating testing for SAP S/4HANA implementations and upgrades, handling testing across SAP Fiori, SAP GUI, and API interfaces, and automating validation for custom configurations. For SAPinsiders, these capabilities ensure business continuity through faster, more reliable regression cycles needed for frequent SAP updates.

See It Live at SAP Sapphire. For SAPinsiders interested in seeing these cloud and automation capabilities applied specifically to SAP systems, Tricentis will be at SAP Sapphire & ASUG Annual Conference in Orlando from May 19 to 21, 2025. Visiting the company’s booth offers an opportunity for live demonstrations and discussions tailored to SAP testing challenges and solutions.