An SAP seldom comes alone

Only in a heterogeneous IT landscape consisting of SAP and non-SAP systems can all business requirements be met. However, managing changes and deliveries in such a best-of-breed environment becomes correspondingly more complex.

As described in the last column, DevOps and the automation tools based on it significantly reduce this complexity. DevOps thrives on the seamless interaction between development and operations in order to fulfill customer wishes more quickly - because requirements change constantly.

This means that the list of requirements, known as the backlog, is constantly being reprioritized, changed and refined - and must be managed dynamically as part of DevOps. The ability to change priorities on an ongoing basis represents a fundamentally new approach to development and delivery.

The individual changes are continuously integrated into new software versions, which in the DevOps model are delivered to the production systems in greater numbers and at shorter intervals. In this context, we rightly speak of Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD).

DevOps in Best-of-Breed Eco Systems

But the whole thing will remain piecemeal as long as DevOps and CI/CD are applied to all non-SAP systems, but not to the companies' SAP solutions. Unfortunately, this is often the case with existing SAP customers due to a lack of suitable tools.

While changes and further developments in the non-SAP systems are imported automatically, the corresponding steps in the SAP world continue to be performed manually. In addition, the impact of changes in the non-SAP systems on the SAP solutions must be determined manually.

Both, however, lead to considerable time delays and are more risk-prone. In order to make continuous development and delivery a reality across the entire IT environment, i.e. including SAP solutions, automation tools for the SAP world must be able to be connected to all other tools required for this purpose via an integration engine and plug-ins.

This includes testing tools as well as solutions for IT service management (ITSM) and DevOps from various manufacturers. Examples would be ServiceNow, Remedy, JIRA, Rally or Github. Their interaction creates an integrated tool landscape.

Thanks to a seamless connection with JIRA, for example, the backlog can be managed for both SAP and non-SAP systems. Integration with Github enables automated delivery of changes to SAP along with changes to other applications.

And thanks to the connection to a ticketing system, for example ServiceNow, it is ensured that all relevant systems and changes have the correct release status before delivery.

Such an integrated toolchain was also the goal of one of our international customers. The company had already implemented the DevOps concept for its non-SAP applications. But unfortunately, the connection to the SAP landscape was missing in order to avoid manual deliveries in the future and to provide IT with complete transparency of all changes due for delivery.

The integration between Github and our SAP automation tool ActiveControl has done just that. Since then, the company has been able to deliver changes across all 15 IT applications, including SAP, in a fully automated way several times a day. Thanks to the full integration of SAP in its CD pipeline, the company benefits from much greater agility overall.

Of course, even in a world of integrated toolchains, all changes have to be put through their paces before they are transferred to the production environments. That's why you can learn more about the crucial role automated testing plays for CD at SAP's existing customers in our column next spring.