A significant factor that contributes to steadily increasing profit margins in any organization is how well it adapts to changes. There are innumerable forms of changes – regulatory and compliance-based, technology-related, business growth and expansion into new markets that give one company an edge over its competitors. Change and adaption is a never-ending cyclical process for all businesses.
Although time, cost and effort play an important role in managing these applications, most businesses usually look for the following, before they approve the budget for software development:
a. The process adopted by the company’s IT team must be economical
b. Results must be accurate
c. The software development lifecycle should be as short as possible
d. All business applications should be flexible enough to be modified so cost can be reduced in investing in new software
e. All improvement and maintenance plans should be in accordance with the business’ goals, guidelines, and must be secure
Common Challenges:
SAP-based and other business applications are critical to the functioning of any business, and therefore there is immense pressure on the organizations to efficiently maintain and upgrade these applications as and when needed. From a code writer to an integration tester, everyone has an important role to play to ensure every release is as smooth and bug-free as possible.
A release management team documents the plan for how the various events during the release should occur. Right from reviewing requirement documents to go-live, every single step is analyzed, explained, and detailed in the plan. However, at every level, there can be challenges due to large number of applications connected together, functionalities residing in multiple modules, hardware glitches, and so on.
There are 3 industry-approved measures we’ve discovered that businesses can enforce to get rid of these challenges and achieve and ensure the developed SAP applications have zero to minimal defects.
1. Perform test and deployment automation – Repetitive and less complex tasks can easily be automated. This massively reduces errors, incidents and downtime as changes can be tested faster and better.
Automation also plays an important role in code deployment. Incorrectly deployed code can render the entire testing efforts futile. So, automating the deployment process, taking into consideration all the sanity checks during the deployment and after, can ensure minimal errors and issues. In case a deployment goes wrong, automation allows it to be quickly rolled back and replaced with the last, correct code base. This way the faulty parts can be quickly fixed and re-deployed. Also, the release management provided by the automation software orchestrates cross-functional deployments, ensuring dependencies are managed properly.
2. Use agile techniques – A business process comprises of various tasks. Rather than having releases that handle a large number of tasks with different coding in one go, it would be simpler to break them down into smaller pieces and focus on them piece by piece. In this way, each task gets thoroughly tested and there is less pressure on integrating a large number of changes in a single framework.
3. Implement integration testing – People are usually focused on a single application task they are assigned. They might not know how other related tasks of the process operate and would impact them. What usually happens is although the revised or new code may independently work fine, it may not fit well with other tasks in the framework or even disrupt their working. It is critical to ensure all tasks in a process, new and old, work together correctly to minimize complaints from end users.
Other factors such as user-friendliness, post deployment monitoring, and continuous integration efforts also play a crucial role in ensuring the smooth functioning of applications in the long run.
At Avo Automation, we’ve built test automation that helps you overcome these challenges. Don’t hesitate to see it for yourself.
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