Undoubtedly, SAP applications like ECC or S/4HANA are the lifeblood of an enterprise. This is due to the fact that SAP enterprise applications store and process massive amounts of data, enabling decision makers to make well-informed, data driven decisions. However, this can only be possible if SAP applications are configured as per your unique business needs. Furthermore, you also need to protect your applications from ever rising cyber threats. Based on threat intelligence provided by SAP and The Onapsis Research Labs, cybercriminals possess the determination, resources, and skill to detect and capitalize on vulnerable and essential SAP applications for businesses, and are actively engaged in these activities.

To address these issues SAP testing comes into play. Testing of SAP applications not only helps enterprises to adopt new realities for elasticity and scale but also enables compliance fulfillment alongwith safety and security of enterprise data. In this blog, we’ll discuss why SAP testing is important, what are the best practices and what you should look for in a test automation platform. 

Why Sap Testing Is Critical for Business Continuity

SAP testing is critical as:

It ensures that business processes are configured properly.

Testing ensures that SAP applications are capable of managing critical business processes – financials, inventory, or supply chain. Testing also ensures that applications can handle all types of data.

• It helps you stay competitive.

To keep up with ever changing business requirements, organizations often set up new business processes or modify the existing ones. Every time a new process is introduced into SAP or an existing one is modified, testing needs to be done. It ensures that there is no negative impact on existing processes.

• It helps keep your applications up-to-date.

When SAP rolls out application updates, regression testing needs to be performed. It ensures that existing workflows and processes are working properly post update adoption.

Best Practices for SAP Testing

• Ensure business requirements are met: As it has already been discussed that SAP applications are mission critical apps, it is necessary that they should operate perfectly. For this, you need to bring in business users since they are the ones who have the best understanding of critical business processes. Also, they are the ones who need to use these applications to complete their day-to-day tasks. 
• Identify potential issues early: According to IBM, fixing bugs in the development phase is cheaper as compared to fixing bugs post production. Thus, to identify potential issues early, organizations need to bring in continuous testing as it ensures that testing is a part of the development process. 
• Be ready to manage change: SAP is a mission critical application for your organization and to get the most out of it, it should be adopted properly by the end users. So, always allocate time for user acceptance testing (UAT) as it allows business users to operate the software prior to launch. Business users validate whether or not the software is ready for deployment in production.
• Look beyond UI: SAP is an ERP application and its use-case is different from regular applications like ecommerce. The business users won’t complain if they are able to do their job smoothly. Thus, QA teams should look beyond UI and invest their maximum time in testing functionality and other things like integration points. However, it doesn’t mean that you overlook UI testing all together. 

What You Should Look For in a SAP Test Automation Tool  

To incorporate continuous testing, test automation is a must to do thing. However, finding the right test automation tool for SAP is a daunting task. With our tips, you can easily get the best tool to automate SAP testing. 

• No code test automation: Since business users play a critical role in SAP testing, it is recommended that you should bring in no code test automation platform. It allows them to create automated tests without requiring programming knowledge. Some of the well-reputed no code tools include Leapwork, Opkey, and Tricentis. 
• End-to-end coverage: SAP hardly operates as a standalone application. It often integrates with other enterprise applications. Thus, always opt for a test automation platform that supports multiple technologies and ERPs.
• Self-healing capabilities: Since test script maintenance requires a huge effort; always opt for a test automation platform that automatically heals up test scripts without requiring human intervention.