Ensuring Quality

At Dreams without Limits, Tess Ter is responsible for managing testing and defect resolution plans. She knows that a good test strategy is key for the quality of the business processes.

She therefore sets up a meeting with Carl Consultant and Joana Junior from Implement HXM! to ask them for the test capabilities of SAP Cloud ALM.

Carl points out that the main goal of Test Management with SAP Cloud ALM is to prepare and execute tests based on SAP content for manual testing and integration of automated testing tools. It consists of two parts:

• Test planning and orchestration (among others) include both the preparation of tests for manual and automated test cases and the orchestration of testing across different test types and test automation providers. In addition, it allows Tess to plan and structure her test execution using Test Plans and to prepare the test on requirements that are based on the business processes.
• Test execution among others includes the execution of manual, step-based test cases, and the integration of test automation providers. For example, SAP S/4HANA offers the SAP S/4HANA Test Automation Tool, and SAP Cloud ALM offers Tricentis Test Automation for SAP.

Tess is familiar with test management and test execution, but she is not quite sure what Joana means by "test orchestration". Joana explains that test orchestration means setting up a well-defined sequence of manual and automated test activities. For example, when new features of the software are marked as ready for release at the end of a sprint.

After this question, Joana continues that, depending on the SAP Solution, it might be able to import test scripts from SAP Best Practice content.

Joana then invites Tess to discuss the requirements for test concepts. Tess walks to the whiteboard and, together with Joana, creates the following table:

At the end of this discussion, Joana explains that Test Management in SAP Cloud ALM offers all the concepts from the table. It uses Test Plans for advanced test orchestration.

Tess then continues that the traceability of tests is an important topic at Dreams without Limits. Together with Anna Lyze, who is responsible for analytics, and who has just joined the meeting, she must make sure that all test activities can be traced, and their results can be evaluated.

When asked by Tess, Joana confirms that test cases can also be downloaded.

In the next meeting, Tess wants to know more about the main objectives and capabilities of SAP Cloud ALM Test Management and the test orchestration. She therefore asks Joana about the objectives and capabilities of SAP Cloud ALM Test Management. Joana answers as follows:

Joana highlights that Test Management in SAP Cloud ALM could be used for both cloud solutions (which Dreams without Limits are implementing) and on premise solutions. Although it is designed for SAP solutions, it can also be used for manual testing of non-SAP components that are included in the business processes.

She continues that the manual testing is fully available with test preparation features, test execution and all the analytic features. The creation of manual test cases is done based on the business activities from the selected business process flow. Therefore, the relevant business activities must be scoped so that they can be included in the test case.

The test automation framework is used by the test automation tool for SAP S/4HANA Cloud (which offers a full automation suite for SAP S/4HANA Cloud that can be integrated into SAP Cloud ALM).

Finally, Joana comes to automated tests. She explains that third-party test automation providers can also be integrated through an API, which means that the orchestration can be performed in SAP Cloud ALM. In the case of Tricentis Test Automation, even automated, reusable test cases can be created in SAP Cloud ALM. Roughly speaking, this means that SAP Cloud ALM is the platform and Tricentis Test Automation is the engine for delivering automated tests to customers such as Dreams without Limits.

From her experience, Tess knows that during the different tests, it is likely that many errors will be detected. Together with Anna, she therefore asks Joana how to handle errors that come up during testing.

Joana highlights that defects can be created directly from the test execution list. As a result, the defect and the test case are then automatically related for traceability and for seamless navigation. Defects contain many attributes such as scope, priority, status, due date, and assigned role, which further enhances the traceability.

Anna then wants to know how they can make sure that the issues will be resolved.

Joana answers that Test Execution Analysis (which is available from the Analytics app) allows for the monitoring of test execution progress using different chart types. The included Executed Manual Test Analysis report provides visibility on the number of actions remaining (work to be done for testers) before a test run could be finished. The Defect Reporting (also available from the Analytics app) helps to monitor the progress of the defect resolution.