Five Ways Test Automation Doubles ROI from SAP Applications

This guide teaches you how to best optimize for your SAP ROI by leveraging the right test automa-tion tool and strategy

Did you know that by 2025, 60% of human tasks will be automated and speech and image recognition technology will deliver 97% accuracy, exceeding even human capabilities?

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) teams can no longer afford to ignore the real benefits of test automation.

Test automation has become an integral part of the digital transformation journey for enterprises across industries. Test automation delivers on the promise of increasing productivity and reducing costs associated with manual software development and testing.

In this eBook, we will talk about how test automation can help you double the value you derive from your existing SAP applications, and show you how test automation can improve the quality, accuracy and speed of SAP application delivery

Introduction

What is Test Automation?

Here’s how it can help your

business.

Frequent updates to modern SAP applications have become commonplace and integrating the latest version without disturbing critical business processes can prove to be an operational chalenge. However, embracing the power of test automation can allow your organization to deliver applications in higher quality, much faster.

Test automation can ease the strain of manual steps in your existing workflow, because it is fast, accurate, consistent and scalable. By leveraging the power of test automation, your team can optimize the performance of applications to suit your organization’s needs in an intuitive and responsive manner.

Test automation involves running soft-ware tests automatically, while utilizing test results to iteratively improve the quality and efficiency of applications. It is a quality assurance process that performs predefined actions, compares the results to what’s expected from the given SAP application, and offers continuous performance upgrades.

RIS

K

RISK RISK RISK

TIME BUDGET

DEVMETHOD

PRODUCTMATURITY

PROCESSMATURITY

PROCESSRESOURCES

TEST COVERAGEFunctionality, UsabilityPerformance, Security

TEST StrategyTest Levels, Test Types,Test Design Techniques

Test Cycles

Automation of testing can seem to be resource intensive in the short term, but efforts pay off in the long run. A first step is to assess and measure the benefits of test automation for your business along multiple parameters.

Test automation can positively impact ROI

Metrics to consider while calculating the ROI benefits of automated testing: Analyze the speed of test execution, measure and compare test duration outcomes for both manual and automated test scenarios.

Conduct cost and resource analysis prior to implementing large scale automation. For instance, pinpoint software and hardware costs and have a clear sense of how automation will impact existing and new resources, in terms of training and billing.

Keep in mind the quality of the final product. Quantify the mean time it takes to identify defects, calculate the cost of early bug detection and assess the overall quality of the build.

Utilize the ROI formula for testing as follows:

You will then be able to envision and quantify the ROI advantages and create a roadmap required for a successful investment. Taking the time to thoroughly analyze the business benefits of automation and compare it to your current manual processes will give you an accurate picture of the advantages test automation brings, and help you decide the next steps.

A survey of testers and QA leaders at midsize and large enterprises across the U.S.Organizations, showed that firms that automate 50% or more of their tests report benefits including faster testing cycles (88%), improved test coverage (71%) and the ability to catch bugs earlier (68%).

ROI for testing automation = (Investment value –

Investment cost) / Investment cost

Effortspent on

AutomatingTests

Dev’tEffort on

ProductionCode

Initialeffort

IncreasedEffort

(Hump)OngoingEffort

Saved Effort

Time

Cost savings due to automation are significant as well, with a nationwide UK survey of 31 executives across 27 countries showing that 5 million pounds, per year, were saved thanks to an outcome-based contract with IBM, with test cycles coming down to just a day from 1.5 weeks of before. These advantages means you can go to market faster, and reduce the time taken for development dramatically.

Over time, test automation saves the overall effort spent by QA teams. Credit: Simform

Need to ramp up the frequency or scope of testing at short notice? Test automation can come to your rescue. Easily enhance your testing capabilities to ensure improved application quality without any of the constraints associated with manual testing. Run 100s of complex test cases during crunch time, increase testing coverage and allocate more digital assistants, in a flexible and dynamic manner as your project requirements change.

An example of time saved with test automation for a healthcare application. Credit: Evon Technologies

Test Cycles (Number Of Test Cases)

Manual vs Automation test execution efforts

Automation testing effort (in hour) Manual testing effort (in hour)

Full Regression(1000)

Partial Regression(250)

Sanity(50)

Smoke(15)

0

50

100160

16

150

200

40

04

80.8 020.2

Test automation improves both speed and agility

Speed is of the essence where testing is concerned. Research shows that automated testing leads to 20x to 40x cycle time improvements and dramatically improves the accuracy of results.

SAP application testing ought to be dynamic, continuous and robust to adequately support business processes that are constantly evolving. Ideally, testing has to be carried out in a quick manner each time the application undergoes a change, to ensure faster go to market outcomes. In this context, manual testing of applications turns out to be costly, time consuming, and prone to error, requiring teams to carry out tests for weeks on end. Whereas, automated tests can be repeated as many times as required at no additional cost, delivering results in a matter of hours, which enables quality assurance analysts to deliver higher quality applications in less time.

Test automation can span many applications Business processes rarely exist in a silo and typically span a variety of different applications. Shouldn’t your approach to testing follow suit? SAP applications that support complex business functions call upon multiple modules and interface with several integrated systems, hence, it becomes important to perform continuous integration testing on these applications, to ensure a smooth workflow. Test automation replicates real-life scenarios better, working even when there are several other applications or users trying to interact with it, making it the ideal choice for reliable application testing in any scenario.

Test automation reduces costs in the long run

In SAP environments, over 72% of companies rely on manual testing to verify changes in critical business processes. Wonder why? This is because test automation tools such as HPE and Worksoft still require a significant amount of user intervention to run ‘automated’ tests — making manual testing an attractive option. Manual testing however, is costly (representing over 30% of the typical SAP project budget,) time-consuming, not thorough and not accurate enough to guarantee that critical risks will be identified in a reliable manner.

Model-based test automation allows for a higher level of test case reuse, thus enabling easier ways to build and maintain complex automation for end-to-end business process tests with no to limited coding skills required. This further helps bringing in Business Analysts and other non technical users into the picture. This helps reduce testing timelines, as well as the risk of business disruption, by exposing potential errors and defects before they can impact your production environment.Test automation further allows you to keep up with accelerated release processes by significantly reducing the time, effort, and resources required to test SAP releases.

Choosing the best partner for your automation journey

Conclusion

Truly automated testing offers a whole host of other operational benefits, during different phases of SAP application testing. Automation improves communication between designers, developers and application users, allowing for potential issues to be flagged off and corrected in a much more timely fashion, during every phase. A testing digital assistant can pick up vulnerabilities across multiple applications and critical touch points, trigger alerts and notify development teams to reevaluate performance, as and when issues arise.

Keeping in mind the dynamic landscape of most modern IT firms transformed by rapidly evolving SAP applications, manual testing may no longer be a sustainable option for players who wish to deliver superior quality projects, within exacting deadlines. Test automation enables businesses to conduct comprehensive testing faster, better and with more process accuracy across mission-critical applications and business functions. Not only does test automation save time and cost, it also ensures proper functioning of these processes, amidst frequent process changes to business functions and technology upgrades.

Avo Automation supports the largest fortune 500 companies with process discovery, test automation and business process automation solutions. We’ve made it our mission to address automation challenges to accelerate customer value. To that end, we have built a Quality Automation System (QAS) that unifies quality, simplicity and intelligence into a single automation solution that allows you to:

Rapidly document processes in hours and auto-generate test automation and digital assistants with a single click

Deliver higher quality applications 2x faster with one holistic system that works across technologies

Achieve over 40% cost savings and increase employee capacity for innovation

Speed up automation by 50% with simple to use, low-code RPA and no-code test automation

Learn more about how Avo’s Quality Automation System can help you double your SAP application ROI. Check out the Avo suite of products designed to offer end to end performance benefits.

REFERENCES https://www.accenture.com/us-en/success-sap-test-automation

https://dzone.com/articles/the-roi-of-automated-testing

https://www.tricentis.com/blog/evolution-test-automation-survey-results/

https://www.transpire.com/insights/success-story/why-auto-mate-your-quality-assurance-scale-quickly-reduce-effort-increase-roi/

https://www.testim.io/blog/automated-testing-roi/

https://www.techarcis.com/metrics-and-measures-to-find-the-true-roi-of-test-automation/

https://www.mercurymagazines.com/pdf/The_Business_Value_of_SAP_Testing_Solutions.pdf

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