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Introduction
In this blog post, I want to share my recent experience of working on an S/4HANA Cloud implementation for a well-known customer in Australia. During this project, my role was to conduct testing using the SAP Cloud automation tool. As we were following the best practices implementation for the customer for phase 1, the testing scope was limited to automation testing using the best practices script.
Throughout the project, I gained valuable insights and learning opportunities that I believe could be beneficial to others who are planning to undertake similar projects. In this blog post, I will focus on sharing these learnings in the hopes of helping others, especially those who are new to the field.
So, if you are someone who is interested in SAP Cloud automation testing or is planning to undertake a similar project, then keep reading to learn more about my experiences and the valuable lessons I learned on this project.
For the purpose of this blog, I have chosen the best practice BD9, which is "Sell from Stock."
To better understand the process, I encourage users to go through the process first to become familiar with this well-known process in the S/4HANA space.
Sell from Stock (BD9) (ondemand.com)
Pre-Requisites
To start with the SAP S/4HANA Cloud tenant should be Integrated with SAP Cloud ALM. This has been covered quite in detail in other blog posts.
Integrating SAP Cloud ALM and the Test Automation Tool [TAT] for SAP S/4 HANA Cloud | SAP Blogs
Test Preparation
Test Preparation
As with any test planning exercise, we will start the test preparation work on our BD9 script. As its a standard best practice item, the test case can be created directly in Cloud ALM using the steps below
Test Preparation
Create New Automated Type Test Case
As stated earlier, for the purpose of this blog we are going to use the solution process BD9.
Create Auto Test Case
Synchronize Test Cases
After creating the test case in Cloud ALM, synchronize it with your S/4HANA test tenant, where the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Automation tool will run. Press the button below to synchronize the test case.
Synchronize CALM Content with S/4 Tenant
The above step will generate a test plan automatically which can be viewed inside the Test Your Processes app. Details in the later section of this blog.
Design Time: Create, Manage and Customize your end-to-end Processes
As part of the design phase you can use the Manage Your Test Processes Fiori App to create and manage end-to-end test process.
Every test process is a set of one or more process steps and a process step is a series of actions which we will see in a bit more detail in subsequent steps. As part of the design work, the automation tester will spend considerable time in customizing and adapting the process steps and actions within them to align with the business process and requirements. Further, the effort will be spent on setting up test data containers relevant for the solution process and its associated data variants.
Create Test Data Container
The test data container are added to the test process and customers can create their own test data containers where needed. Please note that standard test data containers can be enhanced with additional fields if needed by your business process. SAP has provided lots of standard SAP TDC to support the various S/4HANA business processes and most of the time they have enough attributes within a container to support the test process.
The standard best practice scripts, comes with the appropriate Test Data Container. For BD9, the test data container is Sales Order Management and Processing
Test Data Container
Create Variants for Test Data Container
The variants can be accessed by clicking the test data container inside the Manage Your Test Processes App.
Test Data Container
In my project, I had to run the BD9 process across multiple company codes and hence I created multiple variants for the test process.
Each variant based on its company code can have its own set of data including Customer, Supplier, Material etc and can be managed mutually exclusively using the variants.
Variants
Customize End-to-End Process
Once the standard BD9 script is synchronized to the test tenant, the next step is to adapt/customize the standard process to your needs. This can include removing or adding new process steps as per your requirements. This is done in the Manage your Test Processes Fiori App.
Please note that the standard SAP scripts are quite detailed and most of the times need modifications to achieve a successful run. Based on my experience the standard script without any modifications could fail for some reasons. Examples below
- Certain Steps in standard script are mandatory, however they are optional or not required in your end-to end process.
- A different S/4HANA App might be used in your end-to-end process compared to what you have in standard script.
- S/4HANA Public cloud has evolved since the time script was originally recorded and certain screen elements are missing or new ones have been introduced in the standard S/4HANA apps.
Whatever, be the reason, the good thing is that the scripts are flexible in nature and give a good starting point for customer to tailor them to their requirements.
For more details on how to perform these modifications, there is an excellent blog series from Sonam Saxena
https://blogs.sap.com/?p=1387629
https://blogs.sap.com/?p=1387932
https://blogs.sap.com/?p=1388169
As can be seen below, the below process has been customized as the type shows Custom(UI) in the type column
Process Steps
Field Binding - Binding TDC Fields to Process Input and Select Fields
Once you are happy with the TDC, variants, data and the process steps customizations, the next step is to bind the TDC to the Input and Select fields from the process steps inside the Manage Your Test Processes App.
You can use Auto BIND feature, however based on my experience it does not bind appropriately all your required fields and hence manual always works.
Select the appropriate input or select field on left hand side and select the field from the TDC on the right side and Click Bind Button as shown
Field Binding
Run Time: Create, Manage and Execute Test Plans
Manage Test Plan
The test case that we created in SAP S/4HANA Cloud ALM, automatically generates a test plan inside the Test Your Processes Fiori App. This app also allows to create and manage the test plans manually, however as the scope of this blog is running end-to-end test process via Cloud ALM, we don’t have to create any test plan here manually.
Test Your Processes - Test Plan
Assign Data Variant
In this step, you will assign the variants that were created inside the test data container.
Assign Data Variant
Execute Test Plan
For this step, you can log back to SAP Cloud ALM and click on the Test Execution Tile.
Test Execution(CALM)
Run Test Case: Click on Execute Button
Execute Test Case
Analyze Results and Errors
The execution results and progress can be viewed inside the Test Your Processes Fiori app, under the logs section. Execution summaries with screenshots can also be downloaded by clicking on the Download button as shown.
The status column highlights the successful run and the runs with errors.
Logs and Errors
In conclusion, there are several ways to include automation testing scope in your S/4HANA project. By following the above steps, teams can not only fast-track their release strategies for production environments and optimize continuous delivery pipelines, but also gain significant benefits from other applications such as Analyze Automated Test Results. These applications provide full visibility of the test processes during the implementation lifecycle, which can help teams improve their testing methodologies. In addition, my experience with the tool has shown that once it is set up properly, it can accelerate delivery, avoid over-testing and reduce technical debt. This is because everything is wrapped up in the same S/4HANA applications stack, which minimizes the need for additional tools and resources.
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