Simulate instead of repair

The weighty role of SAP-systems in the testing market is due to the fact that these are the transactional heart of many companies in Germany and worldwide.

Intensive and timely testing of new systems or proprietary developments is therefore life-preserving for SAP-User Company. The earlier in the development process that IT is used on systems similar to production test and validate, the fewer critical and thus costly problems can be solved. Error occur with the large Integration tests shortly before go-live or afterwards.

The new version Lisa 7.0 from CA Technologies enables early Testing in complex SAP-environments can be realized quickly and efficiently, because not only the communication based on open standards via Enterprise bus systems analyzed, but also for the first time the direct SAP-proprietary communication via RFCs.

SAP-This enables user companies to carry out intensive testing at a much earlier stage in the development process, taking system dependencies into account.

Initial situation

Around ten percent of SAP's more than 100,000 customers come from the German-speaking region (DACH). From the home market of the SAP come the oldest SAP customers with a high density of very complex system landscapes on frequently different release levels.

Especially because in the German-speaking countries very complex SAP-landscapes with multi-interdependent dependencies between SAP-, but also non-SAP-systems, companies are struggling with the introduction of new systems. SAP–Technology difficult, as the tedious upgrade process to ERP 6.0 shows. And many companies in this country still operate R/3 systems. System landscapes with more than ten different productive SAP-The use of IT systems is not uncommon, even in the upper midmarket, and tends to be the norm in internationally oriented companies.

A major contributor to system complexity in the DACH region is the traditionally widespread SAP-customizing or custom development around the SAP-system landscape. Annually give SAP-According to PAC's calculations, the number of custom development projects in the DACH region by the company's customers exceeds €650 million.

Due to the importance of SAP-systems is the intensive Testing new functions and Applications in part vital for SAP customers, as shown by two exemplary interviews conducted by PAC as part of a study on the SAP-testing market:

• The Australian state Queensland has implemented a new system based on SAP and Workbrain. From the originally estimated cost of the equivalent of 4.2 million euro Costs A report by the appointed investigative committee revealed that the system had gone live without adequate testing. The report declared the project one of the largest IT project failures in the country's history.
• The ambitious project of the U.S. state of California to run the payroll of public institutions on a SAP-platform failed in 2013 after the California Legislature found "significant levels of worrisome Error" had identified. Project failure resulted in Costs: 274 million euros.

Companies are therefore striving to increase the quality of development projects. At the same time, the speed with which new Applications can go into production will be significantly increased in the future, which initially conflicts with an increase in quality.

In the age of digital transformation, the speed with which IT systems can be adapted is crucial to the competitiveness of companies. The importance of speed in adaptation today is demonstrated by the fact that of the Fortune 500 companies from the year 2000, less than half still exist today within just thirteen years.

Former market leaders such as BlackBerry and Nokia are unable to adapt quickly enough to changing market conditions and find themselves in dire economic straits.

The complexity of existing system landscapes makes testing time-consuming, lengthy, difficult and ultimately expensive. In these system landscapes, several internal or external service and development teams often work simultaneously at distributed locations and systems that must be coordinated in the development process.

The availability of test systems and data is limited by different schedules, security constraints, and resource conflicts between different teams unless each team has its own image of the production SAP-system landscape. However, this usually fails due to the Costsnecessary for test licenses and separate hardware.

Due to these limitations, elaborate tests often take place only shortly before going live, if at all.

For functional testing, developers usually write their own test environments to at least roughly test new functionality. test to be able to do so. This is often sufficient, but limited if dependencies on other components or - even more complex - on already existing systems are not taken into account.

In interface tests, mock objects are often used for this purpose in order to simulate the cooperation of independent components. The earlier and better interface, data consistency, stress, load, performance and computer network tests can be performed at component test level, the less effort is required for integration tests. The earlier serious Error detected and the less effort is required to rectify these Error. This is where special software solutions come in.

Service Virtualization

With service virtualization, systems and their behavior are simulated, enabling developers to work more intensively at a much earlier stage on test. What is the idea behind this? If I don't have access to the live system, then I build a model of the system and simulate its behavior.

In principle, this works in the same way as with complex climate models, which can be used to predict the weather fairly accurately, at least in the three-day short term. In this way, statistical models can be used to estimate and then simulate the system behavior of IT systems. This requires data points from which a model of reality can be estimated.

The term "estimated" is deliberately chosen here because a model can never exactly represent the natural system behavior. But today's approximations are considerable and lead to significant improvements in testing. A study by Voke shows the improvements that can result from the use of service virtualization:

• Shorter wait time for resources: Most users wait only half as long or not at all.
• Participants reported significant, measurable benefits:
• Software cycles shortened by 23 percent
• Test cycles shortened by 58 percent
• 24 percent shorter Time-to-Market
  
• increased by 45 percent Test coverage
  
• 22 percent fewer production defects

The better the measurements on which the modeling is based, the better the model. Providers of such test software suites are CA Technologies, HP, IBM, Panaya and other smaller players.

What the different suites have in common is that they feature automated modeling, in which the software virtually learns the system behavior by reading and recording the communication protocols that are exchanged between the systems in production operation.

From the recordings of the communication protocols of the systems such as. XMLSOAP, quantitative variables such as response times can be read out. These can be used to simulate response times, for example in performance tests.

Data models can be abstracted from the transmitted data in the logs. Thus, by analyzing the responses of a surrounding system, certain patterns can be found and dynamized in the resulting model, for example, values that were identical in the request and response, or date values that always lie a certain time in the future or past (delivery date, value date). This works especially well when dealing with open standardized protocols such as SOAP, which are transmitted via a bus system.

For highly integrated or older SAP-systems, however, this type of modeling has its limitations. In these cases the SAP-systems via remote function calls (RFCs). These SAP-specific protocol type is characterized by the fact that communication is very efficient, but also very complex due to its complexity.

The complexity of RFCs makes them difficult to access for test model environments. On the other hand, in Germany still around a quarter of the SAP-customers to use legacy R/3 systems, which often run in parallel with modern SAP ERP-systems are driven and their functionality is required.

Just in Germany RFC protocols are therefore still used very frequently. Advantage for the SAP-The main benefit for customers is that they can keep their legacy systems, which have usually been extensively customized, productive for longer.

Outlook

By integrating RFCs into its Lisa test suite, CA has gained a foothold in the domestic markets of the SAP a Competitive advantage vis-à-vis the top dogs HP and IBM. The recording of the RFC protocols represents an essential step for the further development of the test suites in the SAP-environment.

However, further steps must follow, aimed primarily at providing IT departments with a higher degree of agility. Until now, for example, the development and operating units in IT have still been strongly separated from each other, which usually results in long release cycles.

In the wake of the DevOps trend, this development is being revised, and collaboration between development and operations is to be intensified in order to Time-to-Market from Applications and releases to be further shortened.

In the future, this will require a convergence of development and operational applications, for example the integration of service virtualization into the software world of automatic releasing.

In the coming years, manufacturers of testing and operating software will have to follow this development in order to be able to serve their customers optimally.