PRACTICES UP is an acronym for all ERP in general and therefor for SAP focus areas too, which stands for:
PRACTICES UP provides insight into what needs to be addressed in the SAP Test Strategy. What focus areas have been impacted by a change? Together with SAP Quality Risk Analysis and the available Test Basis, PRACTICES UP is a helpful guideline for defining an SAP Test Strategy.
Processes
| Business processes are leading! |
Verifying and validating the output of SAP business processes is the main focus for SAP Testing. Business Processes are embedded across SAP and non-SAP. SAP and other systems support critical business processes.
Reports
| Everything that is being sent to the customer has to be 100% OK |
All outbound communication needs to be accurate and trustworthy. Reporting requires attention during SAP testing, especially content and readable layout.
Authorizations
| Authorizations have an important role in SAP process handling! |
SAP is used by large companies with lots of different users: Purchase, Production, HR, Sales, Accounting, etc. All these users have different business roles and need different permissions in the application. Some sensitive data, like HR or Financial data, needs to be shielded from standard users. Some actions, like approving certain amounts of sales orders is only available for certain people. Authorizations have an important role in SAP process handling and are important to test thoroughly.
Customizations
| Understand the intended behavior that is achieved through customizing! |
SAP is an “out of the box” solution, however, to make it fit and operational for the organization, configuration of business processes, organizational structure, setting up master data and all kinds of organization specific parameters have to be set.
Transports
| A mistake in a transport can cause serious issues! |
To make SAP functionalities available for the users, all changes and modifications on the system must be pushed and deployed through the system landscape. Transports ensures, moving changes made in the Development system to other systems in the SAP landscape, such as Testing, Acceptance and Production environment (DTAP). Within SAP these are called Transports. Challenges of transports are:
- Changes must be transferred in the proper sequence
- Sometimes an object is forgotten in a transport
- Object dependencies
- Overwriting of code is a possible risk, especially with variables used
- Rollbacks, in case of any issues during the transport, it may be necessary to roll back to the previous state.
Interfaces
| Testing interfaces is a multi-discipline activity! |
SAP will most likely not exist by itself only, integrations to other (Non-)SAP solutions are linked and integrated with SAP solutions. During the E2E testing, it is important that processes, data and communication between systems, are aligned and managed. Besides functional testing of the integration to validate the business process, non-functional tests are important as well like: connectivity, performance and security of the interfaces.
Conversions
| Verify (early) if the processes can handle the converted data! |
When new processes in SAP are implemented, different types of data can be needed for verification of these processes:
- Master- or transaction data from SAP or other systems
- Owner of data is not always clear (e.g.: when used by multiple departments)
- Inadequate monitoring of converted data
- How to check conversion is complete
- Do (new) business processes correctly process converted data?
- Data cleansing
Enhancements
| Enhancements require extra test attention and effort during testing! |
SAP is an “out of the box” solution, (see Configuration), however not all “out of the box” configuration will fit the specific business and organization needs. Therefore, custom development is needed (in SAP this is called ABAP) which is “high risk” as it is new, never used before, code.
- New code created specifically for customer process -> e.g.: Z-transactions
- New code which is part of a new or existing process -> e.g.: specific user exits
- New introduced code which is not part of Standard SAP or SAP Best Practices
Screens
| SAP Screens can be heavily modified! |
SAP screens and user interfaces can be adjusted and modified to the needs of each user or team. Screens can be adjusted so only relevant objects are visible. Therefore it is important that the user interface is fully supporting an efficient way of working, and tested as such, to support the business needs.
User Experience (UX)
| SAP User Experience is how a user experiences, and interacts with, an SAP solution. Improving UX is important for organizations for End User adaptiveness. |
End Users can customize how to work with an SAP solution to suit their personal needs and improve their overall experience and interaction with the solution (Graphical User Interface (GUI) or FIORI tiles). User Experience is subjective, however the attributes that make up the UX are objective.
Platform
| How does the system landscape influence the SAP Testing Strategy? |
SAP can run and connect to many solutions and platforms which can make the landscape complex:
- Cloud (Private, Public, Hybrid)
- On-premises
- Multi-cloud/ Cross cloud (SAP, Google, Azure, AWS, …)
- Platform Data Management
- Integration Suite
- SAP and Non-SAP