Ensuring Business Continuity in a Time of Digital Disruption

In today’s fast-paced world, business leaders are under extreme pressure to innovate, deliver greater value, and increase competitiveness. At every turn, new technology is driving a digital revolution. From agriculture to automotive, financial services to food services, telecommunications to transport, and beyond, the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud, mobile, and big data are powering fundamental change. Such technologies enable organizations to transform existing operations and offer unprecedented opportunities for new business models and ecosystems.

What’s more, this new digital world is evolving hand-in-hand with the expectations of customers, who continue to demand more as innovative new products and services show them what is possible. The world of SAP software is certainly not exempt from this shift, with solutions such as SAP Cloud Platform, SAP HANA, SAP Fiori, and SAP Leonardo having a major impact on the plans of SAP customers.

The Testing Paradox

To stand out in this fast-moving marketplace, businesses need to be able to change and adapt at a higher speed than ever. The resulting pace of change can outrun traditional manual and automated testing, leaving enterprises with a difficult choice between risk and innovation. Famously, even Facebook — once the poster child for rapid delivery — adjusted its mantra from “move fast and break things” to “move fast with stable infrastructure.” The need for stability and risk reduction applies as much to rapid product iterations delivered via a DevOps approach as it does to major IT transformation projects.

This is where the testing paradox rears its head. Effective regression testing delivers the confidence and security needed to maintain business continuity and deliver innovation. At the same time, the heavy speed and financial penalties it traditionally incurs put a brake on agility. Also, in the past, there was no economy of scale — both costs and benefits increased as a regression test regime became more comprehensive. 

International research firm IDC calculated that critical application failure can cost a business up to $1 million per hour,1 but traditional approaches to regression testing can take weeks to run, and months or years to prepare. A new, more efficient way to ensure business continuity is required.

A Transformative New Approach to SAP Testing

Basis Technologies developed “Testimony,” a new solution that employs Robotic Test Automation (RTA) to address this testing challenge in SAP landscapes. RTA reduces the risk of change and gives businesses the confidence needed to operate at a highly competitive pace, without the downside of traditional testing solutions. It protects critical processes from unintended consequences by dramatically increasing scope, decreasing cost, and reducing time needed for regression testing.

Testimony uses RTA to deliver a fully automated solution that learns how an SAP system is used and the way it interacts with others. It autonomously creates a comprehensive regression library, removing the need for expensive legacy approaches that involve time-consuming tasks — such as end-user recording, business process discovery, and test script creation and maintenance.

Due to RTA, Testimony enables an increased pace of change, providing greater business agility. Transformation projects such as adopting SAP HANA or re-platforming to the cloud can be significantly accelerated, while essential SAP updates and upgrades can be performed more quickly and safely. Testimony also provides the means to make agile development and DevOps for SAP software even more effective, supporting continuous testing and faster, more frequent delivery of change. 

RTA frees up valuable functional experts to focus on delivery of core activities rather than supporting regression testing, and it eliminates the challenging test data problems common to traditional approaches. With Testimony, testing becomes truly automated, from creation of test assets to execution and upkeep. System-wide regression testing can be initiated in a matter of days, with no manual intervention and far deeper business process coverage. Testing shifts to much earlier in the development cycle, without external system dependencies.

Far Beyond the Norm

Testimony excels in speed, efficiency, test coverage, and risk reduction. Effective organizations know coverage beyond the user interface (UI) is essential to provide genuine confidence in the quality of change, but most other tools focus only on “outside-in” interactions at the UI layer. Testimony delivers the additional insight required. It validates UI interactions but also monitors SAP software at a code-and-system level, exercising a wide variety of technical interactions and execution paths that cannot be replicated by other testing methods.

In addition, Testimony uses integrated service virtualization to automatically isolate SAP systems from others — whether SAP or non-SAP — providing the means to fully test business processes involving external interactions and integrations. Representative system inputs and outputs are invoked without the need for inaccurate estimation, modelling, or replication of external systems in the project test environment.

A Unique Combination

Through its unique blend of comprehensive coverage and deep technical insight, Testimony delivers an ideal combination of time, cost, and quality improvement without the business disruption typical of traditional automated and manual testing solutions. That means faster delivery, greater system stability, reduced downtime, and the protection of revenue and reputation. To learn more about how Testimony can accelerate change and ensure business continuity in your SAP landscape, and to organize a free demo, visit https://go.basistechnologies.com/testimony_profile  or contact peter.yabsley@basistechnologies.com.