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[This section is a SAP specific extension of the section “Test Automation (Devops)“]
Test automation focuses on automating the execution of test scenarios (preferably for the entire end-to-end business process) to analyze the quality of the application(s). These test scenarios are coming from realistic business processes, which might also consist of back-end calls (API testing) to help with speed and efficiency and enable very frequent execution of tests (e.g.: in a CI/CD pipeline). In the automation process checks/verifications are a vital part of building tests to ensure that the actions are taken correctly, since automation is in essence telling a machine what to do and validating what’s happening in the application to ensure that the scripts are executed correctly and failures/ unexpected results are shown. Examples for SAP would be to verify the message in the status bar and store the created/changed order for later usage to ensure the action was performed successfully.
When deciding on implementing test automation, the reason for starting it is key to being successful. Ensuring speed in the testing process might be a reason. A test automation tool itself cannot solve issues such as delays within your systems or missing data. Stakeholders can do this by being aware of the shortcomings in the processes that are related to quality engineering & testing and selecting tools to mitigate these shortcomings. By doing so, more benefits of test automation can be achieved. The effects of using test tools is described in “Tooling (Devops)“.
Knowing on which layer to automate and which tests to select for different purposes is a vital part of effective test automation, for more information see the description of the test automation pyramid. Overall, the main opportunity for SAP Test Automation would be for regression testing purposes, since this test variety tends to be linear in nature, which ensures predictability of the outcome of a test. This helps to identify where issues lie that need to be solved.
Examples of tools for automated test execution are:
Business success factors:
Technical success factors:
SAP brings complexity for test automation compared to other systems due to the large overlaps in the processes and many different variables such as Master Data & User role set-up. There are quite some dependencies when testing end-to-end, as an entire E2E-process can consist of many different systems that can be regionally different. It is important to carefully select test cases for automation of the end-to-end test, to prevent it from being too large, and to prevent overlap with other tests.
Within test automation it is useful to work with reusable steps and for SAP processes this is quite easily done through making blocks for different transaction codes or Fiori tiles that only differ in the data that has to be processed throughout the application or user that will perform the action. Reusable blocks also ensure that maintenance can be done in an efficient way, considering it only needs to be done in one place when parameters change for a sales order or extra steps are added.
The following challenges and bottlenecks may be experienced when applying test automation. Discussing these bottlenecks upfront of the SAP Test Automation project will create awareness and helps solving these issues:
Automation is an isolated island
Bad test cases
Test data
Thinking test automation assures higher speed of the testing process
Instability of the environment/ technical issues
Complex end-to-end processes
Building Blocks
