SAP and Tricentis Have a Partnership With Benefits

The Tricentis platform is now sold through the SAP global sales force and channel as an SAP Solution Extension. It is also integrated with SAP ALM offerings. Additionally, Tricentis’ base-level test automation capability is being embedded in SAP’s Solution Manager and SAP Cloud ALM.

As already indicated, the focus of Tricentis’ tools is on test automation. SAP Solution Manager comes with CBTA (Component-Based Test Automation) in its basic installation, which can be used to create and execute automated tests. 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 in the SAP cloud.

TTA’s big brother is ECT (Enterprise Continuous Testing), which can be used to create and execute automatic test cases for over 160 non-SAP applications. 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 CBTA by change detection in the ChaRM area based on various events and developer actions. Opposite to LT is SAP Performance Monitoring, which brings its strength in browser- and protocol-based performance analysis.

Which tool should companies choose?

For customers with the SAP Enterprise Support license, there are no additional license costs for either CBTA or TTA. However, corresponding additional licenses must be purchased from SAP or directly from Tricentis for ECT, CIA, and LT. In addition to this purchase, the corresponding expenses for employee training, the creation of test cases, and the maintenance of these tools should not be disregarded.

At first glance, the choice between the aforementioned tools seems difficult, 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 are you spoiled for choice.

Thanks to TAF (Test Automation Framework), TTA and ECT can be seamlessly linked to the solution documentation of Solution Manager. The creation of a test case is then done analogously in CBTA via the test configuration. For the recording of user activities for the automatic creation of test cases, TTA offers ARA-Recorder.

Is the SAP and Tricentis toolbox worth it?

Test automation is not really a new topic. However, increasing popularity, ever-faster progress in the world of artificial intelligence, and the advancement of tools in this field are increasingly bringing it to companies’ attention.

The reasons for this are obvious: increasing software complexity and sometimes high effort in manual testing go hand in hand with required 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, the toolbox that SAP and Tricentis provide is certainly a technical enrichment with many positive options worth considering for one’s own company. If the respective employee now also possesses the appropriate process-related knowledge of their specialist domain, there is nothing standing in the way of successful test automation.

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