Lessons in SAP Automation That Cut Regression Testing Time
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Key Takeaways
⇨ Automating regression testing significantly reduces testing cycles and customer migration times, as demonstrated by the telecom leader's partnership with ImpactQA, which resulted in a 72% reduction in testing cycles and cut migration time from two days to a few hours.
⇨ Implementing a reusable and client-agnostic test automation framework is essential for handling complex SAP environments, enabling comprehensive test coverage across interconnected processes and minimizing risks during system transitions.
⇨ Increased automated test coverage should be viewed as a critical business continuity metric, as it directly mitigates risks associated with untested processes, ensuring stability and agility within SAP landscapes.
Manual regression testing can be a dreaded cycle of late nights and endless spreadsheets for teams that are migrating to SAP S/4HANA. In fact, it can become a bottleneck that slows down innovation and introduces risk into a brand-new system.
However, now there is a way not only to speed up this cycle but to transform it. The case of how a global leader in telecom expense management (TEM) achieved this transformation by partnering with ImpactQA is an ideal example of how organizations can reduce their regression testing times while ensuring accuracy and mitigating risks.
A Global Leader Drowning in Complexity
The TEM company manages complex services and devices for large corporations across over 100 countries. Its operational landscape includes integrations with more than 1,000 service provider partners. Still, they faced the challenge of quality assurance in automating only 1,000 of their 7,000 critical test cases. The remaining were done manually. This led to various challenges that included:
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- A lack of continuous testing practices that hindered agility.
- Painfully slow customer migrations to new versions, sometimes taking up to two full days.
- Complex TEM workflows were inefficient and difficult to validate.
This situation also mirrors the reality in many SAP environments, where decades of customizations, integrations, and critical business processes create a testing burden that feels insurmountable.
The Automation Turnaround
To overcome this hurdle, the company partnered with ImpactQA to overhaul its entire approach. The ImpactQA team built a robust, client-agnostic test automation framework designed for scalability. It also established a baseline for testing across multiple environments and, most importantly, drove the number of automated test cases from 1,000 to 7,000. The results were transformative:
- Regression testing cycles reduced by 72%.
- Customer migration time dropped from two days to a few hours.
- Automated test coverage expanded by 90%, ensuring 98% of complex workflows were supported and validated.
- Overall testing costs dropped significantly.
Thus, this wasn’t just a technical win but a business transformation that enhanced customer experience and accelerated the entire release process through automated testing.
What This Means for SAPinsiders
For SAPinsiders, the parallels from this telecom turnaround story are striking, and the lessons are directly applicable.
Aim for a framework instead of one-off scripts. The key to ImpactQA’s success was building a reusable, client-agnostic framework. In the SAP world, this is crucial. For example, Z-reports, custom Fiori apps, and multi-module business processes are too interconnected for fragile, hard-coded scripts. However, a proper framework allows the team to create durable, data-agnostic tests for end-to-end scenarios that can be run repeatedly across Dev, QAS, and Prod environments with minimal changes.
Utilize automation to mitigate the risks associated with your next major move. The biggest source of delay and risk while testing systems like SAP S/4HANA is the uncertainty of what might break. Comprehensive automated regression testing acts as a safety net. Moreover, the ability to run thousands of validation tests in a few hours gives the project team and business stakeholders the confidence to move forward boldly. It transforms testing from a project bottleneck into a project accelerator, ensuring that when the system goes live, it stays live without disruptive post-launch defects.
Treat test coverage as a business continuity metric. Achieving an increase in test coverage is a direct measure of reducing business risk. In an SAP context, every untested process is a potential point of failure that could impact revenue, supply chain, or financial reporting. SAPinsiders should note that when you automate the validation of 98% of your critical business workflows, you are actively ensuring business continuity. This shifts the conversation from ‘How much does testing cost?’ to ‘How much risk are we mitigating?’ Thus, high automated coverage provides the agility to adapt, update, and innovate within the SAP landscape without fear of disrupting the business backbone.
