Partnership with advantages
As already indicated, the usefulness of the tools lies in the area of test automation. In its basic installation, SAP Solution Manager is delivered with CBTA (Component based Test Automation), with the help of which automated tests can be created and executed.
However, CBTA only supports SAP-based UI technologies on common browsers. With TTA (Tricentis Test Automation), the technology portfolio supported by CBTA is expanded to include various new SAP applications (Ariba, SuccessFactors, Concur, C4C) and supplemented by testing of these in the SAP cloud.
TTA's big brother is ECT (Enterprise Continuous Testing), which can be used to create and execute over 160 automated non-SAP application test cases. From the Tricentis family, CIA (Change Impact Analysis) and LT (Load Testing) are added, each of which extends the test suite as follows: CIA primarily extends BPCA by change detection in the ChaRM area based on various events and developer actions. The LT is contrasted by SAP Performance Monitoring, which brings its strength in browser- and protocol-based performance analysis.
Which tool fits?
For customers with the SAP Enterprise Support license, no further additional license costs are incurred for both CBTA and TTA. In contrast, corresponding additional licenses must be purchased for ECT, CIA and LT from SAP or directly from Tricentis. In addition to the purchase, the corresponding expenses for employee training, the creation of test cases and their maintenance should not be disregarded.
The choice between the previously mentioned tools seems difficult at first glance, but only in one specific case: Only if you have not yet decided on a test automation tool and you want to keep your current SAP system exclusively on-premises, you are spoiled for choice.
TTA and ECT can be seamlessly linked to the Solution Manager solution documentation thanks to TAF (Test Automation Framework). The creation of a test case then takes place analogously in CBTA via the test configuration. For the recording of user activities for the automatic creation of test cases, TTA offers the ARA Recorder.
Toolbox conclusion
Test automation is not really a new topic, but with the increasing popularity, the ever faster progress in the AI world and the advancement of tools in this field, test automation is also gaining more and more attention in companies.
The reasons for this are obvious: Increasing software complexity and, in some cases, high manual testing costs go hand in hand with agility and ever shorter software release cycles. In the future, every company should ask itself the question of possible test automation - at least for clearly defined scenarios.
This is the only way to guarantee a sustainably agile and successful company in the long term. Better preparation for future crises can also be cited as a positive factor, as test automation makes companies more flexible and thus less susceptible to sudden resource collapses.
All in all, this is certainly a technical enrichment with many positive options worth considering for your own company. If the respective employee also has the appropriate process-related knowledge of his or her specialist domain, nothing more stands in the way of successful test automation.
