When you want to maximize the benefits of test automation in complex SAP landscape, you need to approach the beast piece by piece. These seven steps will help you conquer the impossible.
It is normal that testing consumes 30-40% of the average IT budget. Given the amount of work and stakes related to it, it soon becomes clear that manual testing simply isn’t an option anymore. Testing is routinely cited as the #1 bottleneck in delivery speed for example. The industry-average test automation rate is currently a dismal 18% overall—and another research suggests that it’s actually closer to 8% for large enterprises working with complex systems including SAP.
A reasonable approach to test company’s business critical information systems such as ERP depends on the visibility to product development. If the system is developed in-house there's likely a good visibility to actual development teams’ work and quality assurance can be involved in the very early phases of product development. Involving QA early can be referred to as shift-left. On the other hand, a system used as a cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) without any visibility to development is restricted also from the testing point of view. Only production version testing might be possible, often referred to as shift-right.
1 - AI-augmented test analysis and optimization
Testing by itself is done to validate the software solution being developed and guarantee a certain agreed upon level of quality for the product and to make sure no major regression happens in the software.
Machine Learning methods will allow us to bring a larger amount of statistical analysis tools to bear on all the test and telemetry our software pipeline is producing. We will see a surge of different software vendors bringing solutions for different kinds of dashboards and visualizations to provide a way to analyze the validity of our software and provide metrics for just about anything.
The path to becoming a seasoned test automation professional is more about the journey itself than reaching and conquering the final level, says test automation evangelist Jani Haapala. So far, we can see four levels, but other more challenging and enlightening stages may lie in our future.
Even in the best of times, we are constantly being asked to deliver more for each dollar in our budget while simultaneously maintaining existing output. Here are a few tips and tricks to help you stretch your IT budget in 2019.
