Testing S/4 Hana application packages: Agile and in the cloud

"What are the top three SAP initiatives at your company?" S/4 is clearly the most important initiative, followed by the introduction of agile ways of working for SAP projects and the shift of SAP workloads to the cloud.

"In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges for software testing in SAP environments?"

Here, too, the picture was clear. When asked about the most important challenges in the next two years, end-to-end testing for SAP applications and other systems was mentioned most frequently, followed by S/4 testing and the change from manual to automated testing.

These topics are closely interconnected. When companies move to S/4, they connect it to all applications, devices and users involved in transactions. This has a significant impact on testing speed and scope.

Respondents who have already migrated to S/4 continued to see end-to-end testing and test automation as the top two challenges. Migration of legacy test tools is becoming more important, with this topic rising in priority from sixth to third place.

After migrating to S/4, it quickly becomes clear that outdated testing tools are not suited for the new, interconnected and rapidly changing environments.

"In general, how do you assess the development of test automation for SAP?"

An impressive 76 percent of respondents felt that the topic of test automation is becoming increasingly important.

And 88 percent believed automation will continue to be a priority or become even more important over the next two years.

In summary, it can be said that the migration to S/4 is the top priority for the participants in the survey. This was to be expected, as SAP will no longer support the ECC software from 2025.

We've also found that a rapid shift to S/4 is primarily fueled by boards focusing on digital transformation and seeing S/4 as core to the "intelligent enterprise."

Companies switching to S/4 rate S/4 as the platform for digital transformation. Their goal is to connect all applications, devices, and users involved in their business processes across systems. The decision to use SAP as the platform for digital transformation involves four different transformations:

First, the general commitment to digital transformation based on S/4 and Hana. Second, the adoption and scaling of agile processes to prepare for (and keep pace with) the rapid, iterative changes in the SAP platform and the maintenance of the digital enterprise as a digital enterprise.

Third, streamlining existing business processes for the new platform. Most companies have spent years adapting their SAP instances by modifying Abap code.

The more customizations you make in S/4, the more difficult it becomes to achieve the desired speed of change. This slows down your upgrades and ultimately hinders digital transformation.

To speed up the process, the custom processes need to be revised to move closer to the standard SAP implementation Fourth, migration to the cloud.

SAP has not only accelerated transactions for S/4, but also made core applications much more compact, so you can more easily move this workload to the third-party cloud.