The implementation has increased the speed and efficiency of testing for one of the world’s five largest SAP S/4HANA implementations with 200% faster automated test cases.
Vodafone was an early adopter of SAP S/4HANA— the S/4 is short for SAP Business Suite 4, while ‘HANA’ denotes that it runs on SAP’s in-memory database and application development platform of that name. SAP S/4HANA is designed to process the high volumes of data in real time that are needed for enterprise resource planning (ERP).
Vodafone set up one of the world’s five largest SAP S/4HANA implementations in ten months to tackle software testing.
The previous, ageing testing solution (HP/Micro Focus Unified Functional Testing or UFT) was holding the quality assurance team back: they had been struggling with a steep learning curve for defining test automation and a resource-intensive process for keeping it in sync with evolving applications.
Massive migration
Vodafone opted for a new testing approach when it had a massive migration project looming, new SAP technologies that weren’t supported by existing test solution, and ever more (and faster) software releases.
Vodafone faced the following challenges:
• script-based test automation needed a great deal of effort and specialised resources
• to meet the required scope of test automation on tight S/4HANA migration deadlines
• the current test automation solution did not support S/4HANA and cloud, Fiori, Concur, SuccessFactors and SAP GUI
• changes to application meant tedious and resource-intensive test case maintenance
• the applications integrate with more than 500 interfaces and seven cloud providers
• no audit trail from requirements to test plans then test results, which made it difficult to assess the readiness of the overall release
• the team needed substantial help from the vendor to fix problems which added delays and cost.
After an exhaustive requirements analysis and vetting process, Vodafone chose Tricentis to help maximise the productivity and skillset of its QA team.
Model-based approach
Tricentis’ model-based approach enables testers to get up to speed quickly and create automated tests twice as fast as they could with their previous script-based solution. In less than a year, Vodafone went from a predominantly manual testing process with islands of automation to a continuous testing process that automatically verifies end-to-end business processes during each build.
According to Mahesh Shinde, Deputy General Manager at Vodafone, “We have a very diverse platform. SAP S/4HANA, Fiori, Concur, SuccessFactors, BAPI, web, mobile…you name it, it’s there at Vodafone. Tricentis provides a complete platform to test business processes across our entire application stack – not just what we have today, but also looking toward the future.”
Vodafone’s testing team is already thinking about automated testing across its many data imports, integrations, and transformations (with Tricentis Data Integrity) along with analysis of change impact analysis. For this it would use Tricentis LiveCompare to analyse SAP ecosystems and identify which tests need to be executed to cover risks in an SAP update.
Vodafone claims it has achieved:
• 200% faster creation of automated test cases
• 440 days of working time saved within first year
• automated 81% of end-to-end functional testing
• 70% test automation across S/4HANA
• integrated continuous testing within CI/CD for immediate feedback
• migrated over 10,000 UFT tests to model-based test automation
• replaced HP/Micro Focus UFT
• centralised quality reporting has increased stakeholders’ confidence in release decisions
• former manual testers are certified as test automation specialists; and
• a “Community of Practice” has been set up to optimise and share expertise, best practices, and test automation resources.