What Is SAP Testing?
SAP testing means taking what you know about testing and applying it to a system that works differently from most software projects: highly integrated, heavily customized and right at the center of the company’s core processes. A good SAP test strategy therefore starts from the business processes, uses the PRACTICES UP checklist so that no focus area slips through, and plans test environments and test data from the very beginning.
SAP stands apart from other IT systems in its complexity, its degree of integration and its importance for business processes. It is considered one of the leading ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems. Anyone who has worked on an SAP project knows that things run differently there than in “normal” software projects. Deployment, the development cycle, integration. And testing, too.
Much of that comes from how an ERP system arrives: largely ready-made. The team that introduces it writes less code and spends more time on configuration, workflows, data and authorizations. Testing shifts with it. There are fewer classic unit tests and more process checks, interface tests, acceptance tests, output validation and end-to-end tests.
Why Many Testers Steer Clear of SAP
I know plenty of testers and test managers who steer well clear of SAP projects. Ask them why, and it usually comes down to uncertainty. They aren’t quite sure what to test, when and how, which test strategies make sense and where to start. Then there are the stakes. SAP goes right to the core: the company’s most fundamental business processes run through it, and its core data is processed there. That creates risks in many places.
I experienced this firsthand in two SAP projects I supported, and they took a lot of energy and work. My biggest question back then was how to transfer what I knew about test strategies, test objectives and test methods to the SAP world. The answer came after those projects, when the TMAP training “Quality Engineering for SAP” crossed my path. Reading the material, I thought: that’s exactly what would have helped. All the more reason for testers and test managers to get to grips with SAP.
How Do You Transfer Your Test Methodology to SAP?
The familiar test methods still apply in SAP. What they need is a structured approach that fits the integrated nature of the system. Three points shape that approach:
- Modules interlock. A business process rarely runs through a single module. From order to delivery to invoice, data moves through several areas, often into systems outside SAP as well. So the test follows the process from start to finish, across every module it touches.
- Standard versus custom. SAP ships standard functionality that every company tailors through customizing and often extends with its own developments. Both need testing, but not to the same extent. Custom developments carry the greater risk.
- Risk sets the test depth. The riskier a process, the more thoroughly it is tested and the earlier it gets its turn.
The choice of test design techniques follows the same logic. Because SAP revolves around business processes and end-to-end flows, process-oriented techniques bring the most value. Other techniques still have their place, mostly earlier in the life cycle, in unit or system testing.
Risk Decides What Gets Tested First
TMAP for SAP builds the test strategy from three inputs: the PRACTICES UP checklist, the test basis (user stories, process flows, functional documents) and an SAP quality risk analysis. The strategy then feeds the test plan, test design, test execution and the quality gates of every test phase. The test plan turns it into activities and a schedule.
The quality risk analysis usually runs as a workshop with people from business and IT. The business side rates each process in scope by frequency of use and business impact. The IT side rates process complexity and technical impact. Together, the ratings put every process into a risk class.
That risk class decides two things: how intensively a process is tested and when. Critical processes come first, at least with their happy flow in an early round of system integration testing. Lower risk classes follow in later cycles. The type of project matters as well, because an implementation, a rollout and an upgrade each call for different elements in the strategy.
PRACTICES UP: Eleven Focus Areas on One Checklist
I’m a big fan of checklists that are easy to understand. PRACTICES UP is one of them, built for the SAP test strategy. The acronym comes from TMAP for SAP and stands for eleven focus areas that need special attention when testing SAP:
- Processes: What counts most in SAP testing is the outcome of the business processes. It is verified and validated, including where processes reach beyond SAP into other systems.
- Reports: Everything that leaves the company has to be right. Testing covers both the content and a readable layout.
- Authorizations: Purchasing, production, HR, sales and accounting work with different roles. Authorizations have to shield sensitive data such as HR or financial data and reserve certain actions for the people entitled to them.
- Configuration: Customizing sets up business processes, organizational structure, master data and company-specific parameters. Testers need to know which behavior that configuration is meant to produce.
- Transports: Changes move by transport from development through the test and acceptance systems into production. Sequence, dependencies between objects and the ability to roll back all belong in the test. A faulty transport can have serious consequences.
- Interfaces: Interfaces to non-SAP systems need integration testing, both functional and non-functional, which includes connectivity, performance and security.
- Conversions: Data from legacy systems has to be cleaned up, complete and assigned to an owner. Check early whether the new processes can handle the converted data.
- Enhancements: Custom ABAP developments such as Z transactions and user exits are new code that has never run anywhere before. They need special attention and more test effort.
- Screens: SAP screens can be heavily customized. Testing checks whether they support users’ workflows efficiently.
- User Experience: How do users experience the system, for example in SAP GUI or Fiori? That is partly subjective, but it helps decide whether the solution gets accepted.
- Platform: Whether SAP runs in the cloud, on premises or in a hybrid setup, and which non-SAP systems are connected, also shapes the test strategy.
Not every change touches all eleven areas. The checklist quickly shows which ones are affected and makes sure none of them gets forgotten.
What Does the SAP Testing Process Look Like?
Four test varieties are usually relevant in SAP projects, in line with SAP’s Activate methodology: unit test, system integration test (SIT), user acceptance test (UAT) and regression test. Unit tests belong to the developers. Business users mostly come in for UAT and sometimes earlier, for SIT.
SIT checks the entire application including its interfaces to external systems, with a focus on inbound and outbound communication. Large programs plan several SIT cycles and spread the risk classes across them. Once a happy flow passes, it becomes a candidate for the regression suite and for test automation, and that suite grows with every cycle.
In UAT, the future users, or someone acting for them, check in a production-like environment whether the system supports their daily work. The focus moves to end-to-end scenarios: vertically within one solution or module, horizontally across SAP modules, SAP systems and non-SAP systems. After every change, a regression test confirms that the parts that were supposed to stay the same still work. Because it runs so often, it is preferably automated.
Quality gates connect the phases. Before UAT starts, a gate checks, for example, whether business roles and logons are mapped for the testers, whether the interfaces are available, whether the test environment is set up and filled with the right test data, and whether developers are on hand to fix defects.
How Do You Set Up an SAP Test Environment?
An SAP test environment is a separate system in the landscape between development and production. Changes reach it by transport along the DTAP chain: development, test, acceptance, production. That separation is the first rule. The test environment has to be secure and kept apart from production, so that sensitive data doesn’t leak and nobody gets access who shouldn’t.
The second rule concerns the outside world. Settings in the test environment have to block outbound communication, so that no test order or test invoice ever reaches an actual customer or supplier. With interfaces to business partners everywhere, that is easy to overlook.
Filling the environment is the next hurdle. Copying production data into a test system takes a long time, during which the environment isn’t available, and the test system then needs the same capacity as the production landscape. Performance tests suffer from the opposite problem. They belong in a production-like environment, but they often run on systems with less capacity, so the results are never fully accurate.
Test automation adds its own requirements: a stable environment, access rights for the tool and the people running it, and SAP configured to allow scripting.
Test Data Management in SAP Projects
Test data is one of the biggest hurdles in SAP testing. SAP processes the company’s core data, and the master data determines how the system behaves. Meaningful tests therefore need test data that is relevant, realistic and compliant with data protection rules. TMAP for SAP sorts it into five data classes that build on each other:
| Data class | What it defines | What matters in testing |
|---|---|---|
| Configuration Data | Organizational structure, warehouses, product-specific settings | Has to be in place before the first test runs |
| Master Data | Material, supplier, customer and financial data | Prerequisite for every test, determines how the system behaves |
| Conditional Master Data | Rules for specific combinations, such as a price for this customer and this material | Only applies in the matching combination, so the test case has to set it up deliberately |
| Transactional Data | Orders, deliveries, invoices, postings | Builds on master and conditional data, depends on timing and on the process |
| Reporting | Reports and analyses | Only arises from the transactional data |
In practice, that means:
- As small as possible, as realistic as necessary. A good test data set is realistic, valid and varied, and still as small as it can be.
- No unfiltered copy of production. A full copy brings sensitive data into development and test systems and has to be anonymized under the GDPR.
- Select deliberately. Subsetting extracts only the relevant data by criteria such as time period, location or type. That saves storage and keeps testing manageable.
- Protect sensitive data. Masking and role-based access are part of the job.
- Use synthetic data with care. Generated data has to reproduce SAP’s nested structures consistently, or you end up with duplicates and contradictions.
Start with Your Next Change
Strategy, process, environment and test data don’t cover everything. Performance testing and the choice of test management tools each need their own thinking in SAP projects, and so does test automation beyond the regression suite. To get started, it is enough to put PRACTICES UP next to your next change and ask for each of the eleven areas: is it affected, and who tests it? SAP is where the core processes run. A defect there doesn’t end up in some side feature. It ends up in orders, invoices and postings.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does a good SAP test strategy look like?
It starts from the business processes and their outcome. TMAP for SAP derives the strategy from the PRACTICES UP checklist, the test basis and an SAP quality risk analysis. The risk class of each process sets how thoroughly and in which order it is tested. Whether the project is an implementation, a rollout or an upgrade also shapes the strategy.
How is SAP ERP testing different from testing other software?
An ERP system like SAP arrives largely ready-made, so a project changes more configuration, workflows, data and authorizations than code. Testing follows that shift. Classic unit tests matter less, while process checks, interface tests, acceptance tests, output validation and end-to-end tests matter more. The business process becomes the unit of testing.
What is SAP business process testing?
It verifies and validates the outcome of a business process from start to finish, for example from order through delivery to invoice. Such a process usually crosses several modules and often non-SAP systems. Process-oriented test design techniques bring the most value here, and in acceptance testing the scenarios run both within one solution and across systems.
What does system integration testing cover in SAP?
System integration testing checks the whole application together with its interfaces to external systems, with a focus on inbound and outbound communication. Large SAP programs run several SIT cycles and handle the critical processes first. Happy flows that pass become candidates for the regression suite and for test automation.
