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There’s no doubt that automated testing is more efficient than manual testing. However, many SAP customers are hesitant to implement SAP test automation. According to a recent SAP Insights report, more than 45% of SAP users said that a lack of automated testing of their SAP apps was a major concern, while even more respondents were unaware of the risks that are associated with manual testing.
In this blog, we’ll highlight the major challenges that users have in implementing automated testing for SAP, and how Opkey’s Quality Assurance framework address these concerns.
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Common Challenges to Automating SAP Testing
- Build Time: The SAP Insights report suggested that most customers don’t think there are sufficient SAP-specific test automation tools on the market. They think they must develop their own testing framework from scratch, or use open-source tools that rely heavily on coding. Building a framework from scratch is costly and time consuming, while code-based tools require technically-trained employees to create automated test scripts.
How Opkey Solves this Challenge: Opkey is a totally codeless test automation platform, and unlike frameworks built from scratch, customers can get up and running on the Opkey platform in just a few days. Additionally, any employee can create and automate tests with Opkey’s no-code platform—no technical expertise is required.
- Maintenance: According to SAP Insider, 72% of SAP users consider automation maintenance a major barrier because most SAP test automation tools lack the abilityr to reuse scripts. Most test automation frameworks uses static scripts, meaning they cannot automatically adapt to changes that occur due to UI changes in the form of new screens, buttons, user flows, or user inputs. Fixing simple test scripts requires tremendous amounts of time and resources, soto these customers, all the time savings promised by automated SAP testing will erode because test maintenance becomes such a burden.
How Opkey Solves this Challenge: With Opkey’s self-healing script technology, companies can easily eliminate the burden of test maintenance. Whenever an automated script breaks due to a change in the object property (Name, ID, Xpath, CSS etc.), Opkey automatically identifies the change, and fixes the issue without human intervention. Opkey reduces test maintenance effort by more than 90%.
- Risk Coverage: According to the SAP Insider survey, most SAP customers rely on manual testing, and the majority of these customers aren’t aware of the risks that manual testing entails. With manual testing processes, testers create scripts based purely on their experience, or by guessing how end users are interacting with the application. Due to this guessing game, they either test too much—wasting precious time and resources—or test too little, which exposes their application to downtime risk. Business users must be engaged to build tests, as they know their day-to-day business processes, yet traditional test automation platforms require coding skills. As a result of this disconnect, business users must spend hours of time coordinating with technical teams, which is a very inefficient and ineffective way to create a testing program.
How Opkey Solves this Challenge: Opkey’s codeless automation platform allows functional users, business analysts, manual testers, and any non-technical employee to participate in test creation. This means that individuals who are most experienced with their business processes have the power to create tests around their most used process flows, without the need for IT.
- Opkey uses natural language processing (NLP) technologythat allows for the creation of test cases inthe English language. This means that anyone with SAP functional knowledge, business processes, or workflows can enhance the quality and coverage of the test cases.
- Opkey’s AI-powered test mining engine can immediately surface the tests your organization is currently running, and recommend new tests to fill in the gaps. This guarantees optimal test coverage.
- End-to-end Testing: Most SAP customers integrate their SAP environment with dozens of other applications and technologies, including Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Oracle, etc. This creates a challenge because with every SAP update, these integrations and APIs must be tested, too. Finding a test automation platform that supports the entire SAP ecosystem can be daunting task, because most SAP test automation solutions can only support SAP. Bringing in multiple testing platforms for different applications is extremely costly.
How Opkey Solves this Challenge: Opkey supports end-to-end automated testing across multiple technologies—packaged apps plus APIs, ESBs, web, and mobile—and can support these different technologiesin different stages of the development lifecycle. Opkey also integrates with the most popular DevOps tools on the market. Opkey’s automated SAP testing platform eliminates the need for individual testing platforms for different applications.
- Training: As per SAP Insider, 47% of respondents say they won’t implement automated testing for SAP because they’re concerned about the time and resources it will take to train their employees. Their concerns are justified because code-based testing platforms require significant ramp-up periods.
How Opkey Solves this Challenge: Opkey enables functional consultants and manual testers to create test cases in plain English. With just a few hours of training, complex, automated tests can be created with no coding required.
- With Opkey’s NLP-based test automation framework, tests that take hours to create and automated with code-based tools, can be executed in minutes.
- Opkey provides Opkey University, which enables teams to increase their test automation skills and get Opkey certified in a self-taught environment.
Conclusion
SAP customers face five core challenges when trying to automate testing: long build time, expensive test maintenance, low test coverage, End-to-End testing challenges, and a long training / ramp up period.
Opkey solves for each of these challenges with an easy-to-use, robust automation platform, that any employee can quickly master.
Get in touch with us, today.
