ABAP Test Cockpit in the Cloud – How to use baseline

[OlgaDolinskaja]

Many of you are certainly already familiar with the baseline concept in the SAPGUI-based ABAP Test Cockpit (ATC). Baseline offers you the possibility to exclude the well-known or legacy ATC findings from the ATC result to focus your quality assurance efforts only on the new or recently changed code. See also the blog post Remote Code Analysis in ATC - Working with Baseline to suppress findings in old legacy code.

With SAP BTP ABAP Environment 2408 (August 2024 release) we have enabled the baseline also for ATC on SAP BTP for checking of your private cloud (or on-premise) developments. The overview of the central ATC quality system based on SAP BTP ABAP Environment can be found in the blog post Usage of ABAP Test Cockpit (ATC) in the cloud for on-premise developments. Please note that, in order to use the baseline, you also need the Quality Manager – Software Development business role.

Baseline can be created in the Custom Code Migration app. After execution of the ATC run by the custom code analysis project just use the button Add Findings to Baseline to take all ATC findings of this ATC run into the baseline. Thereby you have different options how to proceed with the ATC findings:

• Exempt Findings will indicate the findings as exempted (our recommendation)
• Suppress Findings will exclude findings from the ATC result list.
• Reduce Findings‘ Priority will assign the low priority 3 (Information) to the findings

Let’s check out how to work with baseline based on a couple of examples.

Example 1: Take over all findings into baseline as exempted

After execution of the ATC check run by the custom code analysis project use the button Add Findings to Baseline and choose the option …to Exempt Findings:

After this you can display the status of the custom code analysis project with regard to the baseline in the projects overview by adding the column Findings Added To Baseline. All findings in the baseline are exempted now:

After a renewed ATC check run (create the new custom code analysis project with the same parameters), all findings that are included in the related ATC check result will be treated as exempted and will not appear in the custom code analysis project result:

If developers run ATC checks during development, the findings of the baseline will also not appear in their ATC results. You can remove the findings of the ATC check run from the baseline using the respective custom code analysis project and the Remove Findings From Baseline button:

Example 2: Assign the lower priority to the findings and developer perspective

Now imagine you as developer in your on-premise (or private cloud) system use the central ATC on BTP (see also the blog post How to use ABAP Test Cockpit (ATC) in the cloud as a developer in an on-premise system).

After execution of the ATC check run for cloud readiness in your ABAP development tools for Eclipse you get the ATC error about the usage of the API that will not be released:  

You want to take care of this ATC error later and to do so you can take it into the baseline and reduce the priority. After execution of the ATC run by the custom code analysis project you will see this ATC error in the custom code analysis project result:

On the project view just use the button Add Findings to Baseline and choose the option …to Reduce Findings‘ Priority:

After a renewed ATC check run (create the new custom code analysis project with the same parameters), you will get for this ATC finding information message instead of error in the custom code analysis project result:

If you now as developer in your ABAP development tools for Eclipse recheck your source code with ATC you will also get the information message instead of the error for this finding in your ATC result:

NOTE: please consider that ATC baseline is effective as long as the related code sections remain unchanged. If the code is changed or a new code is added, the unique identifier for each ATC finding changes so that it does not match any more with the finding that has been added to the baseline. Therefore you will get the findings again if you add new code lines to your source code.

Please be aware that after you added the findings of the custom code analysis project to the baseline this project can not be deleted. Only after removing the findings of the project from the baseline you can delete this project.