ERP Software - A Large Market

Organizations rely on enterprise resources planning (ERP) software to manage raw materials, inventory, supply chain, human resources, customer relations and many other resources. The purpose of ERP software is to provide an integrated view of core business processes. Some well-known examples are:

• SAP
• Oracle EBS
• Microsoft Dynamics 365
• Salesforce
• Workday

Since ERP software greatly increases operational efficiency, most companies use them. According to Fortune Business Insights, the global ERP software market is projected to grow from $49.28 billion in 2022 to $90.63 billion by 2029.

ERP software is the backbone of its enterprise customers. Any glitch or downtime may severely impact business operations.

Accordingly, QA and testing tool vendors see opportunities to capitalize on the growth of ERP. Don’t be misled by advertisements full of buzzwords that mystify ERP software testing. Keep reading to learn similarities and differences between ERP and other forms of software testing. Get tips on what can help you test ERP software. And find out why some offerings aren’t quite what they appear to be.

How is ERP software testing similar to common testing?

Like any software, you test ERP software from all angles, including:

• Unit test
• Integration test
• System test
• Functional test
• Performance test
• Security test

A test management tool will help you coordinate these testing activities and put together results to understand the quality status. All the common best practices applicable to QA activities work for ERP testing too.

How is ERP software testing different?

That said, there are special considerations for testing ERP software. Keep in mind these eight differences from regular software testing:

1. Any ERP software involves business processes. You can’t test it without the knowledge and involvement of business users.
2. An ERP system often consists of multiple interconnected parts, for example, SAP integrated with Salesforce. To cover it all, you need end-to-end testing across components. Each component itself can be complicated, for example, Salesforce UI has a heavy DOM structure. All these parts add to the overall complexity.
3. ERP software is meant to support common business functions, such as finance, across a wide range of industries. So they are typically highly customizable to meet the needs of a business. Customization often requires programming and many test cases.
4. It’s difficult to have a test environment close to the production environment, due to interconnected components, some of which are third-party, such as EDI (Electronic Data Interchange). The dynamic data in all these parts are difficult to simulate in a test environment too. ERP software often has special communication protocols to achieve optimized results for its unique purposes. It’s difficult to simulate the real-life traffic that goes through these protocols.
5. ERP software is mission-critical for enterprises and often needs to comply with regulations, which mandate stringent QA with comprehensive traceability.
6. New solutions from ERP software vendors are driving many migrations. Even if you don’t migrate, frequent updates are needed for some of them. For example, Salesforce requires mandatory seasonal updates several times a year. Updates require many testing tasks.
7. The scale of an ERP system grows as your business grows. The number of users and test cases tends to increase over time. That’s why ERP testing projects are often big.
8. Many companies have multiple sites across the country or worldwide, as well as dispersed suppliers, partners, and customers. As a result, business users and QA staff need to collaborate remotely on testing.

What helps testing ERP Software?

In short, simplicity and efficiency are key:

Increase Simplicity

There are multiple ways you can manage the complexity of ERP software. Among them, the most useful are Business Process Models. Since ERP is all about process, a common practice in developing ERP systems is to model the business processes first (model-based design and business process mining), using tools such as Celonis and SAP Signavio. The models become the common language among development, QA, and business teams. Requirements and test cases of an ERP application can all be organized around the same model and linked by relationships.

By using a model-based testing (MBT) tool, you can generate test cases automatically based on the models, ensuring coverage of all sorts of paths and scenarios. It also establishes good traceability between requirements and tests, as well as between two requirements or two tests. When there are changes to the model, requirements and tests can easily stay consistent, reducing test creation and maintenance.

Another way to simplify is through a component-based framework—business process testing (BPT). BPT creates reusable test components that represent specific business processes, such as creating an order or processing a payment. You can then combine and reuse these test components in different test runs. BPT can test ERP business processes from end to end, including integration points with other systems. Like building a PC by yourself with a prebuilt motherboard, hard disk, etc., building a test with components is much easier for business users.

Codeless testing is yet another tool for simplicity. It enables business users to create tests by dragging and dropping parts onto a canvas and linking them to form a process flow. Behind the scenes, the codeless tool generates automation scripts for users.

Increase Efficiency

The following are some approaches that can help increase efficiency in testing ERP software:

Risk-based quality management

Quality has a cost. No organization can fully test every case and scenario with limited resources and time. Risk-based quality management enables you to calculate the risk level of each requirement, based on its nature: Business criticality, functional complexity, and other traits. After objectively evaluating the risk level of all requirements, you can focus on testing the high-risk areas.

Change impact analysis

After your ERP system is in place, changes often happen: patch installation, an upgrade, or a change to your customization. When it comes to maintaining an ERP application, identify which parts the change will impact and focus on testing those places. Some ERP software vendors offer good tools for change impact analysis, such as SAP Solution Manager’s BPCA. You can also use the change impact analysis features in test management tools like ALM/Quality Center and ALM Octane.

Test automation

Manually executing all test cases will take a lot of work, so you need test automation. Depending on what kind of tests you want to automate, there are plenty of tools to use. For example, for functional GUI testing—depending on application type—you may use the UFT family, Selenium, Appium or others.

But test automation is never an easy task. Creating and maintaining automation scripts pose another challenge to development and testing teams. Fortunately, there are solutions that can generate automation scripts based on test cases. When ALM/Quality Center works together with UFT One, it can generate UFT One automation scripts for test cases. The BDD (behavior-driven development) testing framework allows tests to be written in the Gherkin language which is close to natural language. Besides its friendliness to business users, a Gherkin test is easy to automate, and most modern IDEs support plugins for automating Gherkin tests.

One problem with automation scripts is that they may stop working properly when there are slight differences in the test environment. Thus, frequently maintaining scripts is hard work. In recent years, AI technology makes automation more intelligent and adaptive, setting you free from frequent adjustment.

Early issue detection

The earlier you find a bug, the lower the cost to fix it. Late discovery of defects leads to rework, which is very inefficient. That’s why continuous testing and DevOps pipelines are widely seen in ERP testing.

Testing usually needs to be against executables, but now you can test against mockups. Issues are found before code is developed, costing you much less.

With load generator and service virtualization, you can perform shift-left performance tests too. OpenText LoadRunner VuGen supports SAP protocols and Siebel protocols in load testing environments. And OpenText Service Virtualization can simulate SAP IDoc and RFC communication to let you test against these protocols early.

Integrations

It may not be obvious, but the right integration capabilities greatly increase efficiency. For example, many enterprises use SAP Solution Manager (Solman) to manage the lifecycle of their SAP applications, whereas they use a test management tool to manage testing activities. Automatically synchronizing requirements and test cases can save a lot of human effort. That’s not all. OpenText ALM tools’ integration with Solman allows sending Solman’s BPH (Business Process Hierarchy) and BPCA (Business Process Change Analysis) results to ALM/Quality Center or ALM Octane, making change management a seamless experience.

Other Important Factors

There are other factors to consider when choosing tools for ERP testing:

• Workflow and collaboration—Aligning people in different locations to the workflows is important in any testing project, to ensure productivity and reduce human mistakes.
• Scalability—ERP testing projects are often large in scale. Your test management tool needs to handle a large number of test cases and users without becoming unresponsive or slow.
• Regulatory compliance—A test management tool that provides detailed audit trails and comprehensive traceability saves organizations in regulated industries a lot of work.

ERP Software Testing Myths

Buzzwords around ERP software testing sound enticing. But at close glance, you’ll find that trendy solutions may not be as perfect as they seem. Let’s look at some common myths:

Codeless test automation does not require development or maintenance.

Codeless test automation is meant to reduce the effort in creating or maintaining test automation scripts and to enable users to create scripts without knowledge of programming languages. A certain amount of effort is always needed to ensure that automation scripts can perform what you intend to test. Codeless lowers the hurdle, just like mit.edu provides Scratch that even kids can master.

AI-driven test automation is fast.

AI-driven test automation does saves time in creating and maintaining automation scripts and makes test engineers’ life better. But it isn’t faster when executing. AI needs more computing power and can be slower compared to other testing methods.

As of today, AI codeless test automation cannot completely replace other testing approaches because it may not be suitable for all types of applications or testing scenarios.

Traditional testing methods are slow.

“Traditional” is a vague description. At what point does a testing technique become traditional? The reality is traditional ways are not necessarily inferior. It depends on whether you are applying the right technique in the right situation.

Agile methodology is newer, but that doesn’t mean that Waterfall has no value. In fact, we see ERP customers using a hybrid approach or choosing the appropriate one for a specific project. Agile is good for adapting to changing requirements. But many ERP upgrade or migration projects’ requirements are clear upfront. Waterfall works well in these situations.

As for automation testing frameworks, there are quite a few: keyword-driven, data-driven, behavior-driven, component-based, model-based, AI-driven, and so on. Some are newer and some are older. But each of them has advantages and disadvantages depending on the circumstances you are in.  None of them are obsolete, and you can use several in conjunction to achieve the ideal result.

Choose the Right Tools

Testing is an integrated process involving test planning, design, execution, reporting, and management. When choosing tools for your ERP testing, don’t be misled by advertisements full of buzzwords. Consider all parts holistically and also look closely at the details. OpenText Application Delivery solutions offer a full range of capabilities that make your ERP testing highly efficient and well-managed. Check out how our customers successfully maintain high quality for their ERP software:

• SAP rationalization project
• Large-scale S/4 HANA migration
• E2E testing of business system consisting of Oracle EBS, Siebel and Salesforce
• SAP maintenance tests
• Testing SAP with agile and DevOps approach
• Data-driven insights into Oracle EBS testing efforts

Contact us to discuss your needs.