Partnership with benefits

In summer 2020, the time had come: SAP and Tricentis announced their
partnership, thereby expanding the number of SAP-certified test automation tools to three.

As already indicated, the usefulness of the tools lies in the area of test automation. In its basic installation, SAP Solution Manager is delivered with CBTA (Component based Test Automation), which can be used to create and execute automated tests.

However, CBTA only supports SAP-based UI technologies on common browsers. With TTA (Tricentis Test Automation), the technology portfolio supported by CBTA is being expanded to include various new SAP applications (Ariba, SuccessFactors, Concur, C4C) and the testing of these in the SAP cloud.

TTA’s big brother is ECT (Enterprise Continuous Testing), which can be used to create and execute over 160 automatic non-SAP application test cases. CIA (Change Impact Analysis) and LT (Load Testing) from the Tricentis family are added to the test suite as follows: CIA primarily extends the BPCA to include change detection in the ChaRM area based on various events and developer actions. In contrast to LT, SAP Performance Monitoring has its strengths in browser- and protocol-based performance analysis.

Which tool fits?

For customers with the SAP Enterprise Support license, there are no additional license costs for either CBTA or TTA. On the other hand, additional licenses for ECT, CIA and LT must be purchased from SAP or directly from Tricentis. In addition to the purchase, the corresponding expenses for employee training, the creation of test cases and the maintenance of these should usually not be disregarded.

The choice between the tools mentioned above may seem difficult at first glance, but only in one particular case: only if you have not yet decided on a test automation tool and you want to keep your current SAP system exclusively on-premises will you be spoiled for choice.

Thanks to TAF (Test Automation Framework), TTA and ECT can be seamlessly connected to the Solution Manager solution documentation. A test case is then created analogously in CBTA via the test configuration. TTA offers the ARA-Recorder to record user activities for the automatic generation of test cases.

Conclusion on the toolbox

Test automation is not really a new topic, but with the increasing popularity, the ever faster progress in the AI world and the further development of tools in this area, test automation is also gaining more and more attention in companies.

The reasons for this are obvious: increasing software complexity and sometimes high manual testing costs go hand in hand with agility and ever shorter software release cycles. In the future, every company should ask itself the question of possible test automation – at least for clearly defined scenarios.

This is the only way to guarantee a sustainably agile and successful company in the long term. Better preparation for future crises can also be cited as a positive factor, as test automation makes companies more flexible and therefore less susceptible to sudden drops in resources.

All in all, it is certainly a technical enrichment with many positive options worth considering for your own company. If the respective employee also has the relevant procedural knowledge of their specialist domain, nothing stands in the way of successful test automation.

Article from the E-3 magazine