It’s time to talk about the announced ABAP AI capabilities, planned to be delivered with the 2502 release and beyond. ABAP AI is important to all SAP business software developers. It is our shared treasure that we hold in our hands. Let’s take a moment to elaborate a little while on this statement.
ABAP AI is powerful
The new Joule copilot integrated into ABAP Development Tools for Eclipse, offers a full-fledged copilot experience and by that revolutionizes the way ABAP developers work. It provides AI support during the development process, significantly accelerating the creation and testing of custom ABAP applications. These groundbreaking developments have already been revealed and demonstrated at SAP TechEd 2024.
Imagine someone sitting next to you and guiding you, to write very good ABAP code. Not too bad, you might say. Now imagine that person complementing you and even starting to write code or to do unit tests for you. You can even discuss with this person and have them explain code you don’t understand.
Let's take a closer look at some of Joule's ABAP developer capabilities.
Joule for ABAP Code Prediction (Ghost Texting)
This feature helps you code. As you start typing your code, Ghost Text uses AI to propose the next lines of code. The difference between classic code completion already available in der development tools and this new feature is that ABAP AI actually understands the context and makes intelligent suggestions that are aligned with your coding objective. This is made possible by GenAI and SAPs trained ABAP model, which is designed to understand and predict ABAP coding patterns. This allows you to spend even more time solving complex problems and innovating.
ABAP AI Unit Agent
The ABAP AI Unit Agent is designed to assist you generate unit tests for an ABAP class. This ensures that your code is thoroughly tested. Traditionally, you would have to write unit tests manually, which is time-consuming and likely to be error-prone. With the ABAP AI Unit Agent, you can automate this process: You run the unit test for the ABAP class and check the code coverage option. The ABAP Unit Test analyzes the code coverage and identifies the methods that are not adequately covered. The ABAP AI Unit Agent adds to this the generation of unit tests.
ABAP and Core Data Services Code Explain
This feature makes ABAP, including ABAP Core Data Services (CDS), easier for developers to understand. When you select an ABAP class, CDS view, function module, a method or a code snippet, ABAP & CDS Explain analyzes the code and generates a human-readable explanation. This explanation includes a high-level overview of what the code does, as well as detailed explanations of each component. It is designed to understand ABAP coding patterns and conventions, so that it can provide accurate and useful explanations. By providing clear explanations of complex function modules, it helps developers improve their understanding of ABAP coding patterns, and best practices.
ABAP AI is attractive
SAPs ABAP AI SDK, powered by Intelligent Scenario Lifecycle Management (ISLM ), serves as an "AI toolbox" for ABAP developers. It allows you to incorporate AI capabilities to your custom ABAP applications. The ABAP AI SDK integrates seamlessly with the SAP BTP GenAI Hub, enabling you to leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) and infuse AI capabilities into your custom applications. This SDK is also used internally for all ABAP-based AI solutions.
With the ABAP AI SDK, you can easily access and use the models and features provided by the Hub by calling released ABAP classes and interfaces directly in your application code. The ABAP AI SDK takes care of the rest, executing prompts and handling the complexities of integrating AI capabilities into ABAP. This seamless integration significantly simplifies the process of incorporating AI into business applications. If that is not attractive, what is?
ABAP AI is a treasure
Even more powerful than the ABAP AI developer use cases mentioned above is the ABAP custom code migration use case. Our shared goal is to help our customers and partners to transform their custom code and move into SAP’s cloud universe.
ABAP AI for Custom Code Migration will be a game changer in achieving this goal.
We will help you transform your custom code by accelerating the transformation of custom code. Whether it's the mandatory transformation of ABAP code when migrating from ECC to SAP S/4HANA or the subsequent transformation of ABAP code to ABAP Cloud and a Clean Core.
ABAP AI support is provided for the migration of from the classic business suite to SAP S/4HANA and to ABAP Cloud and a Clean Core. This will include explanations of the mandatory simplification items to be considered during your SAP S/4HANA transformation, as well as code suggestions for refactoring your classic ABAP code towards ABAP Cloud. The corresponding AI features will be integrated in the Custom Code Migration App as well as in ABAP Development Tools for Eclipse.
Let us summarize: ABAP AI is powerful. ABAP AI is attractive. ABAP AI is a treasure.
Have a look at the ABAP AI roadmap for more information:
https://help.sap.com/docs/abap-cross-product/roadmap-info/genai
Bluesky
