SAP Quality and Testing: An Overview and Key Trends

With the rapid pace of change in SAP, the move to SAP S/4HANA, as well as the adoption of cloud applications, quality assurance and testing have become increasingly critical. The deployment of these solutions on multi-cloud and hybrid environments adds complexity. In addition, SAP applications are now integrated with a large number of both SAP and non-SAP applications which also makes it difficult.

SAP teams, used to multi-year development projects followed by years of maintenance, must now adapt to this rapid, multi-modal development world. Change management and testing functions have become critical to meet this scenario, yet many customers struggle with them. This leads to subpar application quality, suboptimal business value, compliance issues, business disruption, project delays, and budget overruns. Several high-profile deployment failures continue to make the news.

SAP Quality and Testing: An Overview and Key Trends

With the rapid pace of change in SAP, the move to SAP S/4HANA, as well as the adoption of cloud applications, quality assurance and testing have become increasingly critical. The deployment of these solutions on multi-cloud and hybrid environments adds complexity. In addition, SAP applications are now integrated with a large number of both SAP and non-SAP applications which also makes it difficult.

SAP teams, used to multi-year development projects followed by years of maintenance, must now adapt to this rapid, multi-modal development world. Change management and testing functions have become critical to meet this scenario, yet many customers struggle with them. This leads to subpar application quality, suboptimal business value, compliance issues, business disruption, project delays, and budget overruns. Several high-profile deployment failures continue to make the news.

SAP research Change Management and Testing in SAP found that nearly half of respondents are not satisfied with their change management and testing functions. There is a desire to modernize change management and testing across the SAP landscape. Further, SAP S/4HANA plans are likely to accelerate modernization in change management and testing.

Quality Assurance and Testing

Testing and QA go hand in hand.  A recent SAPinsider Market Insight points out that “testing and QA functions must be transformed with respect to their process and collaboration and provided with modern tools to keep up with the pace of change and the quality expectations.”

The traditional approach of throwing finished code over the wall to quality assurance and testing teams that maintain defects in a spreadsheet is no longer viable. Hence, companies are transforming their testing functions to meet the demand for high software quality, performance, security, and user satisfaction rapidly.

Quality Assurance, SAP Cloud Integration, and SAP S/4HANA

Today, QA is critical for SAP Cloud Integration and SAP S/4HANA. According to SAP, quality assurance is integral to the SAP Cloud Integration development process.

When it comes to deploying SAP S/4HANA, QA and testing is just as important as architecture and development.

Cognizant provides a QA framework for SAP S/4HANA deployment that includes automated testing. Several consultants such as PwC and CapGemini provide expert services for quality assurance and testing. Companies like Panaya and ManageCore provide technology solutions to automate testing. Companies like Worksoft are also investing in holistic automation for end-to-end quality assurance and testing as outlined in this blog Holistic Automation – The Next Wave in Business Transformation.

Read this market insight on Modernization of Software Testing