A recap of this year’s SAP ALM Summit
SAP ALM Summit EMEA 2021 covered many interesting topics about SAP Solution Manager, SAP Focused Run, Signavio, Tricentis, and so on. The most prominent topic was SAP Cloud ALM and how SAP is fully dedicated to Cloud ALM. To sum up, all topics SAP introduced is quite comprehensive. So, in this post, we’ll focus on what SAP introduced for SAP Cloud ALM and Tricentis Test Automation.
SAP Cloud ALM
This year’s SAP ALM Summit showed that SAP remains entirely focused on Cloud ALM for its ALM product roadmap. It is evolving from a “little brother” tool to the primary ALM offering pulling its own. And will eventually swap places with its big brother Solution Manager. We also have to say that Solution Manager is not going to disappear from the scene anytime soon, as there have been a lot of recent success stories and innovations around it.
SAP Cloud ALM covers two phases – implementation and operations.
SAP Cloud ALM for Operations continues to get new features and supported products regularly. It is not quite ready to replace the stable and solid Solution Manager, but it could soon be a real alternative for some companies to monitor their entire SAP landscape – and not just cloud solutions!
Operations consist of Business Process Monitoring, Integration & Exception Monitoring, User & Performance Monitoring, Job & Automation Monitoring, and Health Monitoring. So, it covers almost all critical areas of system monitoring but with a clear shift from a technical IT view to a more business-oriented view. The summit covered practically all these areas with several presentations. Not everything works like advertised yet, but we are in close contact with our colleagues from SAP. Although there wasn’t much new for those already investing time in Cloud ALM, we can tell SAP’ is committed to the future of Cloud ALM, and it was nice to see that we at blue.works are on top of the game.
SAP Cloud ALM for implementations has also grown. It now includes change management, for example. It will also keep API support open for customers’ solutions to add more functionality and value.
I am looking forward to trying out the capabilities of the new Cloud Transport Management System. It has the potential to become the change management solution for those who don’t want to invest in a full ChaRM setup.
Testing with Tricentis
Next, let’s look at the new features introduced for Test Automation with Tricentis. These new features will be available at the end of the year or the beginning of 2022.
Currently, tests run in a dedicated client system, which executes the test configuration from Solution Manager. Here we trigger the launch of Tricentis Test Automation for SAP/ECT and the associated test case. This option, however, is not highly scalable. In the future, the test configuration execution will use the SAP ECT server, and the Distributed Execution Agents will start automation. This change will solve the scalability problem.
Currently, there are two execution modes to execute test configurations:
1. Direct execution – allows the user to execute test cases immediately from Solution Manager or Tosca Commander.
2. Scheduled execution – from the test plan, schedule test executions on a defined time, with data defined through the test package.
Synchronization of test data will be more integrated. The test suite will have a new menu option for test packages that will allow manual synchronization of test execution results between Tosca and Solution Manager and display the last sync time.
Additionally, test packages with associated test configurations in Solution Manager will create an execution list with a separate execution entry for each test configuration. This triggers the execution of the distributed execution agents, and results synchronize to the execution list of both Tosca Commander and Solution Manager.
More news
Another highlight of the summit was the presentation of Marc Tier and Nicolas Alech about the integration not only of Tricentis but also of Signavio. As Marc Tier emphasized here, many customers are unaware of all elements’ terrific integration and traceability. Nicolas brilliantly showed the unique power of the Solution Readiness Dashboard on the SAP demo system with its “very tight integration and flow through all the UIs.”
We were deeply impressed by the Traceability Matrix of the Test Suite Dashboard. You can quickly see all requirement ids, work package ids, and associated work items in one view.
Additionally, the dashboard displays test plans, test cases with their execution status. And if applicable, defects and defect corrections along with their transports.
You can drill down into the details of every object. The same matrix will also come to Cloud ALM.
In summary, there are a lot of exciting improvements ahead of us for SAP ALM.
