SAP DevOps

What Is DevOps?

Today’s technology space is defined by rapid application rollouts, upgrades, and updates to meet growing business demand to be agile, innovative, and competitive. Today’s landscape is also characterized by an interconnected network of SAP and non-SAP software that needs to function in tandem. Agile and DevOps approaches can transform software change management in a big way with software development teams being able to deliver change faster and more frequently, with automation enabling testing and deployment to keep pace with rapid development.

What Is DevOps?

Today’s technology space is defined by rapid application rollouts, upgrades, and updates to meet growing business demand to be agile, innovative, and competitive. Today’s landscape is also characterized by an interconnected network of SAP and non-SAP software that needs to function in tandem. Agile and DevOps approaches can transform software change management in a big way with software development teams being able to deliver change faster and more frequently, with automation enabling testing and deployment to keep pace with rapid development.

What Is SAP DevOps?

An SAPinsider report on Change Management and Testing in SAP found that while the traditional waterfall model dominates for SAP ERP Central Component (SAP ECC) or SAP Business Suite (37% vs. 28%), Agile and DevOps are starting to make inroads within SAP teams (43% plan to roll them out and 38% plan to roll out DevOps orchestration tools).

SAP teams, used to multi-year development projects followed by years of maintenance, must now adapt to this rapid, multi-modal development world. Many SAP teams struggle, leading to subpar application quality, suboptimal business value, compliance issues, business disruption, project delays, and budget overruns.

SAP teams need a suitable SAP-specific solution, with the capability to connect SAP to external continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) tools for non-SAP software. Several DevOps tools are available to accelerate workflows and enable CI/CD from ServiceNow, Microsoft Azure DevOps, and Rev-Trac; there is also open-source software such Jira, Jenkins, and GitLab.

These tools include change requirements management, source code, version control, and configuration management, among other things. Several of these tools can work across SAP and non-SAP and offer several features to enable DevOps.

• Service Management: ServiceNow enables SAP change tickets to be stored and managed with the tickets for other systems. It’s possible to create an integration between ServiceNow and the SAP development environment using an SAP DevOps solution. DevOps for SAP orchestrates and synchronizes approvals across multiple development tracks, while updating status in ServiceNow as change progresses through the pipeline.
• Agile Backlog Management: An agile tool like Jira can enable management of user stories as the business requirements change, with the SAP DevOps platform ensuring SAP development stays in sync with the current priorities in Jira, supporting reporting on status, Kanban boards, and traditional agile retrospective reporting such as burn down charts.
• Automated Testing: By integrating SAP development through a DevOps automation platform, it’s possible to keep SAP testing aligned with non-SAP testing. Testing automation tools from vendors such as Panaya ensure that testing results are verified across pipelines, preventing the deployment of change until everything passes testing requirements.
• Pipeline Integration: Many parts of the development cycle – approving code, release to quality assurance, and ultimately deployment to preproduction and production – are part of the integrated pipeline. With DevOps tools, there is full visibility of all software development through standard tools and greater efficiency resulting from standardized processes.

With the increasing business pressure and availability of sophisticated tools, Agile and DevOps practices will continue their adoption trend in SAP clients. DevOps is coming to your SAP team – read this article to take three steps before it arrives.