Business Process Testing and SAP Accelerator

Transcription

1 Test Automation Focused On Your Business: Mercury Business Process Testing Accelerator For SAP Author : Srinivasan Sitaraman Published in October 2010 Hexaware Technologies. All rights reserved.

2 Table of Contents 1. Introduction 2. Limitations of Traditional Automated Testing 3. Business Process Testing 4. Non-Technical Building Block Approach to Test Design 5. Reusable Components for Project Acceleration 6. Integrated Test Automation and Documentation 7. Centralized Test Maintenance 8. Business Process Testing Accelerator for SAP 9. Business Process Testing Accelerator for SAP Components 10. The Power of the SAP Accelerator 11. Testing At A Higher Level: Two Simple Examples 12. Mercury Business Process Testing Benefits Summary 13. For QA/Test Engineers 14. For the CIO 15. For the CFO 16. For the CEO 17. How to Implement Business Process Testing 18. How To Get Started: Five Steps To Transformation 19. Products/Services Supporting Mercury Business Process Testing 20. Mercury Quality Center 21. Mercury QuickTest Professional 22. Mercury WinRunner 23. FocusFrame Testing Accelerators 24. Mercury and FocusFrame Professional Services Offerings 25. The Mercury / FocusFrame Solutions Advantage 26. Summary 27. About FocusFrame Author s Bio Pandian C Muneeswara Pandian C Muneeswara is the Principal Consultant from Hexaware Technologies, with more than 13 years of experience in leveraging metadata of BI systems. You can reach him at muneeswarap@hexaware.com Hexaware Technologies. All rights reserved. 2

3 Introduction Mercury Business Process Testing is a true breakthrough for IT quality initiatives. The culmination of a multi-year, multi-million-dollar R&D effort, Mercury Business Process Testing launches a new generation of test automation solutions and a new era of business-centric test automation. Mercury Business Process Testing is part of Mercury Quality Center, an integrated set of software, services, and best practices for automating key quality activities, including requirements management, test management, defect management, functional testing, and business process testing. Now, for the first time, non-technical experts can quickly build tests for complete business processes without coding expertise - so they can focus on the business process rather than the testing tool. Mercury Business Process Testing represents a major advance over previous-generation test automation products on several fronts, and delivers capabilities and benefits no other product on the market can match. For example: It greatly simplifies and speeds up the test design process with a groundbreaking innovation called components (business process building blocks) This paper presents a brief overview of the Mercury It allows quality assurance (QA)/testing teams to start the test design process much Business Process Testing concept and its advantages for your business and your test teams. It also summarizes sooner - during system design - accelerating time to deployment for high-quality how Mercury Quality Center offerings, Quality software Accelerators from Mercury and FocusFrame, and It generates automated tests and test case documentation in a single step, saving a professional services offerings can help you implement significant amount of test automation work Mercury Business Process Testing quickly and costefficiently. It enables QA teams to use pre-packaged test assets and best practices to implement test automation for leading Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications, saving time and leveraging the experience of experts It raises the adoption rate for test automation because it s easy to deploy and use. In short, Mercury Business Process Testing is capable of increasing the productivity of subject-matter experts and QA/test engineers alike - not by small increments but by quantum leaps Equally important, Mercury Business Process Testing can help you get more out of the tools you may already have purchased, and goes handinhand with consulting and training services available from Mercury. It will integrate smoothly with any work already created using Mercury QuickTest Professional, Mercury WinRunner or Mercury Quality Center, you can expect high return on investment (ROI) and fast payback for your transition to Mercury Business Process Testing. Limitations Of Traditional Automated Testing Automated software testing has come a long way in a short period of time. Each successive generation of products has solved significant challenges. Yet with each advance has come a new set of issues to be resolved. First-generation products, introduced about 15 years ago, were hardware-based capture/playback systems that recorded keystrokes and replayed them on demand. These tests were easy to create, but they provided limited validations and checkpoints, and they were difficult to maintain when changes occurred. Second-generation solutions, which appeared about 10 years ago, were software-based capture/playback systems that recorded test cases and represented them as scripts. This approach provided wider test coverage and more robust checkpoints and validations, but it required specialized development skills and did not completely solve the maintenance challenge. Every time an application changed, the test scripts had to be updated- resulting in changes to many lines of code - and the documentation had to be constantly updated to reflect the changes. Third-generation automated testing solutions, called test frameworks, have been on the market since Test frameworks added a layer of abstraction over the scripting process so that non-technical people could build tests. With this approach, subject-matter experts (also called business analysts) could draw on a library of pre-built keywords, which implemented a specific action against the application (for example, click the OK button ). Keywords enabled people to develop automated test cases with no procedural programming experience. Test frameworks led to dramatic productivity increases for many software testing teams, but they still had a few shortcomings. For example: The operations performed by any particular keyword tend to be very fine-grained, so designing a test for an entire business process can still require the use of hundreds of individual keywords, a time-consuming process Since test framework solutions consist of files with keywords and their associated data elements, subject-matter experts find that they are still creating scripts, despite promises by some vendors of scriptless test design Hexaware Technologies. All rights reserved. 3

4 Traditional test framework products are not always backwards-compatible with previous-generation technology such as recorders, limiting flexibility. With some framework products, engineers can t get under the hood and modify the code that s underlying the keywords, even if they want to Test frameworks and keyword-based products still don t function at the business process level, forcing subject-matter experts to think like programmers, which constrains adoption rates Business Process Testing: A Transformation, Not A Technology Mercury recognized that solving the challenges of traditional test automation required a new approach, not another new technology. Mercury has developed a fourth-generation approach that radically streamlines test design, test automation, test maintenance, and documentation. How Business Process Testing Works A Brief Overview The transition from table-driven test frameworks to business process testing is evolutionary in terms of technology, but revolutionary in terms of capabilities. The next sections describe the core concepts underlying business process testing, followed by a discussion of the benefits to subject-matter experts, QA engineers, and the business as a whole. Non-Technical Building-Block Approach to Test Design One of the key advances business process testing provides subject matter experts is the ability to assemble business processes on the fly via components. Components are simply modules of a business process. Using components, subject-matter experts can quickly create multiple user scenarios, validate each one, and optimize the business process flow without ever having to touch any procedural code or keywords. Mercury Business Process Testing is a fourthgeneration approach to streamlining test design, test automation, test maintenance, and documentation. The core concepts of this solution include: A non-technical, building-block approach to test design. Reusable components for project acceleration. Integrated test automation and documentation. Centralized test maintenance. For example, in many applications, users need to log on before they do anything else. With the business process testing approach, the Log On function is available as a component that can be dragged and dropped into a test script. The Log On component would include the various user steps in the log on process-for example, launching the application, entering the user name, entering a password, and clicking the submit button. To create an entire business process test, the subject-matter expert simply selects the desired component from a tree-structured list (like the File Manager in Windows ), then drags and drops components onto a business process testing Workspace. For example, the Log On component described above could be the first step of a business process for placing an order within an ERP system. Other components might include Find Previous Quote, Approve Quote, Convert Quote to Order, View Open Orders, Confirm Order, and Log Out. Prior to execution, components are eventually implemented by a subject-matter expert or a QA engineer using keywords. But the implementation of the components is separated from their design and use in creating scripts, so the subject-matter expert can focus on the business process. Reusable Components for Project Acceleration Once the components have been built, they can be used and reused in every test case that requires similar functionality-so you can use a single component in hundreds of different test cases with little to no extra effort. By simply selecting the appropriate component via drag and drop, subjectmatter experts can mix and match components to create multiple scenarios and test sets for different needs. This eliminates the thousands of lines of redundant script code that used to be created, stored, and maintained for each application. The result: Project teams can build automated tests for complete business processes in a fraction of the time previously required. REQUISITION TO PAY ORDER TO CASH FORECAST TO FINISHED GOODS SERVICE AND SUPPORT RECORD TO REPORT AND OTHER ACCOUNTING HUMAN RESOURCES CORE BUSINESS CORE BUSINESS SUPPORT Each component can be used and reused in any number of test cases, so the more overlap you have in processes, the more you benefit from business process testing. The Business Process Testing Accelerator for SAP has been divided into SAP s six mega processes. In addition to the application-based components that are described below for the SAP Accelerator, we also offer more generic components that work across applications. These more general components cover application-independent tasks such as sending , formatting text in files, printing reports, etc. that can be quickly integrated into an SAP Accelerator test. These application-independent components are a useful legacy of our years of component-based testing before Mercury Quality Center and Mercury Business Process Testing were a functioning reality. Hexaware Technologies. All rights reserved. 4

5 Integrated Test Automation and Documentation Previous-generation test automation solutions suffered from a lack of integration between the test automation process and the documentation process. With Mercury Business Process Testing, while you re designing the tests, you re also automating and documenting at the same time. And Mercury is developing the capability to export the documentation to simple-to-access, easy-to-read word-processor formats such as Microsoft Word. Centralized Test Maintenance One of the leading causes of shelfware or abandoned application projects is the inability to keep up with automated test maintenance requirements. With Mercury Business Process Testing, when you make changes to applications, Mercury products provide the ability to show the QA engineer or subject-matter expert which test components and tests need to be scanned for any necessary updates. Changes are isolated to components, so there are fewer total changes and the changes are populated to test cases automatically. And since test-case documentation is generated automatically, there is no longer a constant struggle to synchronize changes to the test-automation script with the documentation. Business Process Testing Accelerator for SAP To further expedite projects involving popular ERP and CRM applications, Mercury and FocusFrame have introduced Testing Accelerators, or pre-packaged test assets and best practices for testing and maintaining SAP applications. The Business Process Testing Accelerator for SAP has been divided into SAP s six mega processes. Customers using the SAP Accelerator have the option of implementing any one or more mega processes depending on their own implementation of SAP. The Accelerator Architecture is based on Mercury Business Process Testing and can accommodate any number of mega processes. Requisition to Pay: This mega process covers the entire procurement event, from purchase requisition creation and approval, through the actual payment for and stock of goods Order to Cash: This mega process covers the order entry and fulfillment process to the point of actual cash receipt for sold goods Forecast to Finished Goods: As the name implies, this mega process starts with a manufacturing forecast and covers all aspects of MRP from rawmaterials through to finished goods stocking Service and Support: This mega process is involved with the post-sales processes of service, returns, maintenance, and customer support. In addition to the core business processes mentioned above, SAP also deploys business processes that are not involved in the regular business cycle Record to Report: This mega process is mostly involved in the Finance and Control (FICO) processes for regular financial reporting and periodic closing of the books Human Resources: This area covers the entire hire-to-retire collection of human resources business processes SAP standard toolbar business components. Business Process Testing Accelerator for SAP Components The mega business processes are used as outlines to describe the overall business process. Within each of these mega processes, numerous SAP Transactions have been broken down into manageable, reusable components. These components are combined and recombined to meet the business process testing needs of Accelerator customers. Business Process Testing Accelerator for SAP components have been developed in three categories: SAP Transaction Components: The SAP Components have been divided into pieces of functionality that are large enough to stay manageable, but also small enough so that if users want to branch their functionality, they can do so without creating additional SAP Transactional Components SAP Actions and GUI Functions: In this area, the standard SAP actions such as logging in and out, GOTO Transaction and other capabilities have been coded and parameterized for easy use SAP Application and Standard Toolbar: In this area, all of the application and standard toolbar components from the entire SAP application have had their actions coded in Mercury Business Process Testing Hexaware Technologies. All rights reserved. 5

6 The Power of the SAP Accelerator Since all of the SAP interactions (buttons, commands and GUI functions), SAP Transactions, and SAP mega processes with SAP have been developed through the use of Mercury Business Process Testing components, the ability to create a robust testing regression suite has been dramatically enhanced. Accelerator customers can use the out-of-the-box configuration as more than just a starting point for the creation of their own business process based tests. With the Accelerator, all of the potential interactions and transaction-level test branching have been anticipated and developed as components. As such, business users can modify the out-of-the-box configuration to meet their own needs, or can create complex testing streams using Business Mercury Process Testing s drag-and-drop functionality. While still available, classical scripting and record and replay requirements are effectively retired through the use of Mercury Business Process Testing and the SAP Accelerator. Testing At A Higher Level: Two Simple Examples The examples below contrast how a test automation project might proceed with-and without- implementation of Mercury Business Process Testing and the SAP Accelerator. Example 1: The CFO wants to add new online purchase requisition approval rules to conform to the recent Sarbanes-Oxley audit. With Business Process Testing and the SAP Accelerator: All of the testing functionality involved in the requisition process has been outlined and developed into Mercury Business Process Testing components in the SAP Accelerator under the Requisition to Pay mega process. With their understanding of the new business process, subject-matter (business) experts can now quickly assemble the new business process tests by selecting needed components, build and verify multiple test cases and scenarios, and mark the new or changed components for implementation or updating. The entire testing process can now be completed in hours or days instead of weeks or months Without Business Process Testing and the SAP Accelerator: Although similar testing functionality may have been developed for other purchasing processes, the new testing effort will require a new test automation script development effort as well as new documentation - and will require considerable technical expertise for automated test script creation that is currently in short supply. As a result, time-to-deployment could be over a month and costs will be two- to three-times those incurred through the Mercury Business Process Testing and SAP Accelerator approach Example 2: A key automation engineer leaves the company unexpectedly at the beginning of a critical project, taking her programming skills and intellectual capital with her. With Business Process Testing and the SAP Accelerator: Specialized test automation expertise is not required on the part of subjectmatter experts for Mercury Business Process Testing, so the departure of this employee does not prevent other qualified subject-matters experts from creating and modifying test components and test cases, allowing them to make significant contributions quickly Without Business Process Testing and the SAP Accelerator: IT management must quickly find another individual within or outside the company with similar expertise, incurring the considerable expense of recruiting, hiring, and paying the high salary required by people with the specific skill set needed. Test automation on the project languishes until the new employee is on the job Mercury Business Process Testing Benefits Summary For Subject-Matter Experts Build tests by dragging and dropping components No more programming No record and replay Design tests, automate tests, and generate documentation simultaneously. No more separate design, scripting, and documentation process Reuse a single component throughout hundreds of test cases. No more re-inventing the wheel For QA/Test Engineers Cut the time and effort spent on test maintenance Eliminate duplicate script maintenance by isolating changes to a single component that is reused by all test scripts No more updating all scripts individually Hexaware Technologies. All rights reserved. 6

7 For the CIO Get testing projects started-and finished -sooner. Get high-quality, thoroughly tested software deployed to end users and customers faster. Increase the coverage and efficiency of testing while decreasing costs. Improve morale among test teams by streamlining and simplifying test automation processes. Get lines of business (LOBs) participating in and signed off on testing projects sooner. For the CFO Achieve a quantum leap forward in test productivity for a small incremental investment Make your finance team test auditors instead of test programmers Maximize the ROI of products and processes your company has already implemented Your business could benefit from business process testing if: There is overlap between your processes. You are currently transitioning to automated testing. You are evaluating or moving toward the Quality Center of Excellence model. For the CEO Get innovative new application services up and running sooner, bringing in new customers and new revenue streams, and making employees more productive Gain a competitive edge over competitors that are still doing things the old, slow, expensive way Avoid the costs of software defects and reap the rewards of consistently excellent applications and web services: greater customer satisfaction and loyalty, more repeat business, higher revenue and profits Get LOBs more involved in more testing projects more quickly and at a lower total cost How to Implement Business Process Testing One of the most important advantages of Mercury Business Process Testing is that it leverages tools, technologies, and skill sets many companies have already invested in, such as Mercury QuickTest Professional, Mercury Quality Center applications (formerly Mercury TestDirector applications), and (in future versions) Mercury WinRunner. That means the incremental cost of transitioning to Mercury Business Process Testing is likely to be small, while the potential benefits to your testing teams and your business are substantial. Checklist: Your Business Could Benefit from Business Process Testing If Whether your software testing is currently manual, automated, or a mix of both, there is a good chance your business could benefit by transitioning to Mercury Business Process Testing. Here are a few guidelines for evaluating the extent to which Mercury Business Process Testing can help you cut costs and improve efficiency. In general, your business is a candidate for business process testing if: There is overlap between your processes. If many of your business processes share common elements or steps, Mercury Business Process Testing will enable you to use- and reuse- the Accelerator components and prepackaged content for common SAP functions. The more overlap your processes have, the more you can reuse components over and over, and the more benefit you will realize You are currently transitioning to automated testing. Automation is the key to improving the speed, accuracy, and flexibility of the software testing process, and can give your company the ability to find and fix more defects earlier. If you are currently in the process of moving to automated testing, you may have already purchased the basic tools needed for business process testing, and establishing Mercury Business Process Testing as your next milestone can help accelerate your company s adoption of automated testing practices and their benefits You are evaluating or moving toward the Quality Center of Excellence model. This model is becoming increasingly popular because it provides a centralized source of testing expertise as well as standardized quality management and optimization best practices. While the Quality Center of Excellence model is not required for business process testing, centralizing your company s test automation expertise can be an effective way to optimize the efficiency and consistency of your test projects. For more information, see Mercury s white paper entitled Building and Managing a Quality Center of Excellence Hexaware Technologies. All rights reserved. 7

8 How To Get Started: Five Steps To Transformation Products/Services Supporting Mercury Business Process Testing Mercury Quality Center The effort required to transition to Mercury Business Process Testing may be a matter of a few hours or a few days, in many cases. This section summarizes five easy steps to get up and running. Step One: Get the Tools. Many companies already have licensed and installed some or all of the key tools needed for Mercury Business Process Testing. The complete set of tools is contained within the Mercury Quality Center software suite, described later in this document. If you re already using Mercury QuickTest Professional and Mercury Quality Management applications, you already have most of the skills you ll need to move up to Mercury Business Process Testing Step Two: Get Some Additional Training. To jumpstart your productivity using Mercury Quality Center, you may need a small amount of additional training. Subject-matter experts who are adept at using Quality Management applications or Mercury QuickTest Professional may require as little as two to three hours of additional training. Those who need to develop skills using Mercury s basic test automation tools can get fully trained in two- to three-day workshops offered through Mercury or third-party training vendors Step Three: Start Creating Your Test Components. With proper tools and training, you are ready to begin laying out actual test cases using the keyword-driven, component-based approach. At this point, you will need to make decisions about the scope of specific components (decide what level of functionality is to be included within each one), and begin actually creating your components Step Four: Start Creating Actual Business Process Tests. Using drop-down lists of components, you can now begin assembling actual user flows. If you re missing a needed component, you can use Mercury Quality Center to create one and add it to the business process flow on the fly (of course, each component needs to be stepped out, or broken out by the individual steps that comprise the process) Step Five: Automate your Components. Once the subject-matter expert has filled out the business process template with stepped-out components, the components are ready to code and can be forwarded to QA/test engineers. The engineers then automate the components, adding detailed checkpoints, error handling capability, and so on Mercury Business Process Testing will integrate smoothly with existing tools such as Mercury QuickTest Professional, Quality Management applications, and, in the future, Mercury WinRunner. The complete set of tools and technologies required for Business Process Testing is contained within Mercury Quality Center, and is supported by a broad spectrum of consulting and training services from Mercury. Mercury Quality Center is used by developers, QA teams,and business analysts to perform automated software testing and QA across a wide range of IT and application environments. Offering the first Center of Excellence approach to quality management, only Mercury Quality Center addresses the needs of everyone involved in the quality lifecycle process. Mercury Quality Center integrates and automates key quality activities- test management, functional testing, and business process testing. It lets you share and reuse testing expertise across the quality lifecycle, and it provides a customizable workflow that easily adapts and extends to your specific quality process needs. Mercury Quality Center automatically generates, collects, and presents quality key performance indicators (KPIs) in real-time, so you can make faster, informed decisions about application readiness. And it creates a permanent audit trail to keep track of all quality management steps. Mercury Quality Center includes: A real-time dashboard that presents key quality performance indicators (KPIs) from a business perspective. Integrated applications that automate key quality activities including test management, business process testing, and functional testing. Automatic collection of quality KPIs from multiple sources across multiple stages. Best practices developed through more than 3,000 customer engagements. A scalable, high-availability solution built on a proven, extensible foundation to share and reuse tests, data, scripts, and reports. Mercury QuickTest Professional Mercury QuickTest Professional, a core product of Mercury Quality Center, provides the industry s best solution for functional and regression test automation for practically every software application and environment. With QuickTest Professional, companies benefit from ActiveScreen technology, which offers the industry s shortest learning curve for testers, and TestGuard technology s easy-to-maintain tests. For more information about QuickTest Professional, and to download a free 14-day trial, visit the Mercury website at Mercury WinRunner Mercury WinRunner gives your organization a powerful tool for enterprise-wide functional and regression testing. WinRunner captures, verifies, and replays user interactions automatically to identify defects and ensure that business processes work flawlessly upon deployment and remain reliable. WinRunner allows you to reduce testing time by automating repetitive tasks and optimize testing efforts by covering diverse environments with a single testing tool. Hexaware Technologies. All rights reserved. 8

9 FocusFrame Testing Accelerators Partnering with Mercury, FocusFrame has developed Testing Accelerators, which are prepackaged test assets (components, scripts, files, and best practices) for implementing and maintaining leading ERP and CRM solutions. For example, the SAP Testing Accelerator is the definitive s olution for SAP Applications testing, providing a ready-made package of individual and end-to-end test scripts specifically designed to be extensible to each client s unique SAP environment. With the SAP Accelerator, your organization will be able to fully regression-test your SAP implementation with minimal effort for each and every patch and upgrade; roll out new application functionality faster than ever before; and leverage your test bed for years to come. Mercury and FocusFrame Professional Services Offerings Both Mercury and FocusFrame offer a full spectrum of consulting services to help you take full advantage of the benefits of Mercury Business Process Testing and the Testing Accelerators. Wherever you are on the path to business process testing, we can help you take the next step quickly and cost-efficiently. The Mercury / FocusFrame Solutions Advantage No other vendor has yet introduced a test automation product, technology, or capability that offers the level of completeness, integration, or ease of use that Mercury Business Process Testing provides. Specific advantages include: Investment protection. You can continue to use the industry s most popular test automation products, leveraging the skills you ve already developed while adding new test automation capabilities and efficiencies Cost savings through centralized maintenance. Competitive technologies still don t address the cost and complexity of test maintenance. Mercury Business Process Testing centralizes and simplifies test maintenance, resulting in substantial savings Higher level of abstraction. Mercury s component-based approach goes a step beyond the table-driven test frameworks advocated by other vendors, making the subject-matter expert s job simpler and helping to get complete business process templates to coding experts faster Summary With the introduction of Mercury Business Process Testing, Mercury has brought test automation into a new era. Business Process Testing removes the technical complexity and specialized expertise from the test design process, so subject-matter experts can focus on the business process rather than the test. Mercury Business Process Testing delivers a higher level of productivity to your test teams and a higher level of quality to your finished software applications. The transition to Business Process Testing is non-disruptive to your current processes, protects your previous investments in tools and training, and delivers an ROI that is likely to be competitive with any other investment your business will make. The question to ask yourself is not how you ll manage the transition to Business Process Testing, but how you ever managed without it. About Focus Frame FocusFrame is a leading international Mercury Alliance Partner with a pure focus on Mercury-based solutions. FocusFrame is the leading producer of Testing Accelerators and a pioneer in the development of business process testing - even before it was formally adopted by Mercury. FocusFrame uses its APT (Approach, People, and Technology) methodology and large international and outsourcing consulting staff to help its clients get the most from their Mercury investment. Founded in 2000, FocusFrame has helped hundreds of global companies reduce defects, reduce IT risk, and reduce the TCO of their IT investments. Hexaware Technologies. All rights reserved. 9

10 To learn more, visit Address 1095 Cranbury South River Road, Suite 10, Jamesburg, NJ Main: Fax: Safe Harbor Certain statements on this whitepaper concerning our future growth prospects are forward-looking statements, which involve a number of risks, and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties relating to these statements include, but are not limited to, risks and uncertainties regarding fluctuations in earnings, our ability to manage growth, intense competition in IT services including those factors which may affect our cost advantage, wage increases in India, our ability to attract and retain highly skilled professionals, time and cost overruns on fixed-price, fixed-time frame contracts, client concentration, restrictions on immigration, our ability to manage our international operations, reduced demand for technology in our key focus areas, disruptions in telecommunication networks, our ability to successfully complete and integrate potential acquisitions, liability for damages on our service contracts, the success of the companies in which Hexaware has made strategic investments, withdrawal of governmental fiscal incentives, political instability, legal restrictions on raising capital or acquiring companies outside India, and unauthorized use of our intellectual property and general economic conditions affecting our industry. Hexaware Technologies. All rights reserved.