Five Ways Test Automation Doubles SAP ROI

What is Test Automation?

Frequent updates to modern SAP applications have become commonplace, and integrating the latest version without disturbing critical business processes can prove to be an operational challenge. However, embracing the power of test automation allows your organization to deliver high-quality applications faster.

Test automation involves running software tests automatically while utilizing test results
to improve applications’ quality and efficiency. It is a quality assurance process that performs predefined actions, compares the results to what’s expected from the given SAP application, and offers continuous performance upgrades.

How can it help your business?

Test automation eases the strain of manual steps in your existing workflow because it is fast, accurate, consistent, and scalable. By leveraging the power of test automation, your team can optimize applications’ performance to suit your organization’s needs intuitively and responsively.

Here are the 5 ways test automation doubles SAP application value:

1. Test automation positively impacts ROI

The first step is to assess and measure test automation benefits for your business across multiple parameters.

• Analyze test execution speed, measure and compare test duration outcomes for both manual and automated test scenarios.
• Keep in mind the quality of the final product. Quantify the mean time it takes to identify defects, calculate the cost of early bug detection, and assess the build’s overall quality.
• Conduct cost and resource analysis before implementing large-scale automation. For instance, pinpoint software and hardware costs and understand how automation will impact existing and new training and billing resources.

A survey of testers and QA leaders at midsize and large enterprises across the U.S.Organizations, showed that firms that automate 50% or more of their tests report benefits including faster testing cycles (88%), improved test coverage (71%) and the ability to catch bugs earlier (68%).

ROI for testing automation = (Investment value – Investment cost) / Investment cost

You will then be able to envision and quantify the ROI advantages and create a roadmap required for a successful investment. Taking the time to thoroughly analyze the business benefits of automation and compare it to your current manual processes will give you an accurate picture of the advantages test automation brings and help you decide the next steps.

A survey of testers and QA leaders at midsize and large enterprises across the U.S.Organizations showed that firms that automate 50% or more of their tests report benefits that include faster testing cycles (88%), improved test coverage (71%), and the ability to catch bugs earlier (68%).

Cost savings due to automation are significant. A nationwide survey in the UK of 31 executives showed that £5 million per year were saved, thanks to an outcome-based contract with IBM, with test cycles came down to just a day from 1.5 weeks. These advantages mean you can go to market faster and significantly reduce the time taken for development.

2. Test automation improves both speed and agility

Need to ramp up the frequency or scope of testing at short notice? Test automation can come to your rescue. Quickly enhance your testing capabilities to ensure improved application quality without any of the constraints associated with manual testing. During crunch time, run 100s of complex test cases, increase test automation coverage flexibly and dynamically as your project requirements change.

Speed is of the essence where testing is concerned. Research shows that automated testing leads to 20x to 40x cycle time improvements and dramatically improves accuracy.

SAP application testing has to be dynamic, continuous, and robust to support the constantly evolving business processes. Ideally, applications have to be tested quickly each time a functional change or addition happens to ensure a faster go-to-market.

In this context, manual testing of applications turns out costly, time-consuming, and prone to error, requiring teams to carry out tests for weeks. On the contrary, automated tests can be repeated as many times as needed at no additional cost, delivering results in a matter of hours. This, in turn, enables the QA teams to deliver higher-quality applications in less time.

3. Test automation can cover various applications

Business processes rarely exist as a single application and typically span a variety of different applications. Shouldn’t your approach to testing follow suit? SAP applications that support complex business functions call upon multiple modules and interface with several integrated systems; hence, it is essential to perform continuous integration testing on these applications to ensure a smooth workflow.

Test automation replicates real-life scenarios better, working even when several other applications or users are trying to interact with it, making it the ideal choice for reliable application testing in any scenario.

4. Test automation reduces costs in the long run

Model-based test automation allows for a higher level of test case reuse, thus enabling easier ways to build and maintain complex automation for end-to-end business process tests. The no-code approach further helps to bring in Business Analysts and other non-technical users into the picture. This helps reduce testing timelines and the risk of business disruption by exposing potential errors and defects before they can impact your production environment.

Test automation further allows you to keep up with accelerated release processes by significantly reducing the time, effort, and resources required to test SAP releases.

In SAP environments, over 72% of companies rely on manual testing to verify critical business process changes. Wonder why? This is because existing test automation tools still require a significant amount of user intervention to run ‘automated’ tests — making manual testing an attractive option. Manual testing, however, is costly (representing over 30% of the typical SAP project budget) and time-consuming. Not to mention is the high defect slippage into production.

5. Your SAP experience is better with the right business partner

Automated testing offers a whole host of other operational benefits during different phases of SAP application testing. Automation improves communication between designers, developers, and application users, allowing potential issues to be flagged off and corrected at the right time.
A test automation solution can pick up vulnerabilities across multiple applications and critical touchpoints, trigger alerts and notify development teams to re-evaluate performance as and when issues arise.

Keeping in mind the dynamic landscape of most modern IT firms with rapidly evolving SAP applications, manual testing may no longer be a sustainable option. Especially for the players who wish to deliver superior quality projects within exacting deadlines.

Test automation enables businesses to conduct comprehensive testing faster, better, and with higher accuracy across mission-critical applications and business functions. Not only does test automation save time and cost, but it also ensures the proper functioning of these processes amidst frequent changes to business functions and technology upgrades.

How Avo is a Game Changer

Avo Automation empowers the largest Fortune 500 companies with its technology agnostic and no-code test automation solution – Avo Assure. With Avo Assure, you can automatically create and deploy test cases faster, at no additional cost, without writing a single line of code. Being cross-platform compatible and intuitive, it enables continuous testing and makes SAP upgrades, and migrations easier.

• With a click of a button, expand test automation coverage up to 90% by executing end-to-end SAP and non-SAP applications repeatedly.
• Accelerate SAP releases 85% faster than manual testing because Avo Assure works seamlessly in a heterogeneous environment.
• Achieve 2x productivity as Avo Assure enables you to reuse test cases and test applications faster. Utilize the saved time to innovate or test more applications.
• Save more than 30% of your SAP automation effort with uber-cool features like accessibility testing, intelligent reporting, smart scheduling and execution, advanced dashboard, and more.

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