What is SAP Performance Testing? 

SAP performance testing helps IT teams ensure that their SAP software landscapes are consistently high-performing, reliable, and support business demands. 

The criticality of performance testing SAP software has only increased with today’s SAP system landscape. Multiple systems integrate with business processes, spanning different business functions, and involving multiple SAP applications, third-party products, and middleware.  

Testing modern SAP applications powered by SAP S/4HANA and SAP Fiori 2.0, which involve many highly distributed components, is especially important.  

What is SAP Performance Testing? 

SAP performance testing helps IT teams ensure that their SAP software landscapes are consistently high-performing, reliable, and support business demands. 

The criticality of performance testing SAP software has only increased with today’s SAP system landscape. Multiple systems integrate with business processes, spanning different business functions, and involving multiple SAP applications, third-party products, and middleware.  

Testing modern SAP applications powered by SAP S/4HANA and SAP Fiori 2.0, which involve many highly distributed components, is especially important.  

Key Performance and Scalability Indicators 

Before testing performance it is important to understand two fundamental characteristics.  

1. Response time. Defined as the time between when a user triggers an interaction and the user sees a UI that is ready for the next input, expected response time can vary depending on the perceived complexity of the task. “Users make assumptions about the complexity of each request and, based on these assumptions, they grant the system a corresponding amount of time to process their request,” writes the author of an SAPinsider article. “The time users allow for the system depends strongly on their perception of the complexity of the task. Achieving sub-second average end-to-end response times is a target for interactive applications that process business data of normal volumes. Sub-second response times are standard and in line with studies on perceived performance conducted by our usability team.” 

1. High throughput. More relevant for background processes, high throughput is generally expected to result in systems running in an optimized and predictable manner — even in high-load situations. “The precondition for high throughput is having software and hardware that are scalable. A scalable software system can predictably handle increasing amounts of work and should be easily extendible to process more tasks,” writes the author. 

Case Study: McKesson Ensures Business Continuity with Automated Testing 

McKesson runs one of the largest SAP environments in healthcare. Its complex landscape, the nature of its business, and a goal of updating its software on a daily and sometimes hourly basis required the company to implement rapid and rigorous testing. It undertook a testing transformation in 2019 working with Tricentis, implementing its enterprise continuous testing platform, and preparing for an SAP S/4HANA roll out.  

At the time of the case study’s publication McKesson was well on its way to reaching 90% test automation with a 35% reduction of testing costs. And, McKesson is able to prevent unexpected, adverse effects on the processes its clients depend on. 

SAP Performance Testing Tools 

SAP provides solutions for performance testing, including SAP Enterprise Performance Testing by Tricentis, formerly named SAP Load Testing by Tricentis. It offers cloud-based testing.  

And, SAP LoadRunner by Micro Focus. It can be used to validate software performance, virtualize your network, simulate workloads, benchmark production system performance, and optimize your deployment of SAP HANA software. 

Tricentis and Panaya are considered leaders in SAP software testing, including performance testing.