This year I got to know SAP fairly intimately, looking at it and into it from a test automation perspective, inventorising the possibilities and opportunities of automated testing of a (huge) SAP implementation. During this time I ran into a fair amount of SAP related people, ranging from SAP consultants and sales people to ABAP-developers, HP sales people and SAP preferred suppliers. They all are making it seem as though SAP development and testing is a different world, nothing to do with the “normal” software development world. In my view this is wrong, SAP is just software. Yes, it has a bunch of particularities which you do not get in so many other packages, but in terms of the actual functionality it is fairly comparable to Siebel and Oracle (no, I am NOT saying it’s the same, I am merely saying it is comparable). With neither Oracle nor Siebel this almost religious separatism exists, yet they too are bound by the laws of business process models, transaction codes and what not. So how come SAP is seen as so special and the others are not? Is SAP special? When you start talking about test automation and SAP the first things that pop up are some SAP proprietary names such as CATT, eCATT and SAP TAO. Fortunately SAP themselves recommend against the use of either CATT or eCATT, so let’s dismiss these right here and now, they are tools that once were somewhat helpful but now should be considered redundant for most SAP implementations. SAP TAO however is of a different breed. SAP TAO is pushed by SAP as being the solution to use when trying to automate your testing. One minor issue with SAP TAO however is that it does not really automate anything on its own, you invariably need HP Quality Center (HPQC) and Quick Test Professional (QTP) with it. HP tooling has some tailor-made solutions to integrate well with SAP TAO and more specifically with the SAP Solution Manager. The setup as proposed in this picture is the ideal picture as SAP would like to envision and implement a SAP testing solution. However, not all organisations have Solution Manager up and running for anything other than transport and low level reporting, nor do all organisations have the budget for the HP tool set. When working with SAP TAO effectively and efficiently, the Business Blueprint, the description of all business processes as used by the organisation with the SAP systems, should be residing in the SAP Solution Manager. This blueprint should be maintained carefully and always be up to date. When changes to the system are made, either by updates to the system or by customizations in ABAP, these changes should be visible in the Solution Manager, ensuring the SAP Solution Manager Business Process Change Analyzer can identify which processes have changed and based on this impact analysis propose tests within HP Quality Center to be executed. With SAP TAO the testers can “automate” the tests, which effectively means record the steps. SAP TAO then adds some secret sauce by cutting longer scripts up into maintainable and reusable chunks. These scripts will then be sent from SAP TAO into HPQC, where they can be associated with functional test descriptions. When a tester now wants to run one of the automated tests, or for that matter wants to run the entire automated suite,  HPQC is used again to trigger the scripts, which get executed with QTP. In other words, the actual testdriver is QTP, not SAP TAO. When starting up a SAP GUI instance and analyzing it with something like UISpy or some other tool which can show the objects on a screen, the fields and buttons are barely visible and not really open to test automation. Yet it is possible. If SAP is configured to enable scripting, the UI objects become accessible and thus the GUI is scriptable with any tool of your choice. The moment this little flag has been set, a whole new world opens up in the GUI, it’s all of a sudden open, the fields, screens and buttons all have an ID and can be hooked into by a driver of your choice. Effectively what the enable scripting setting does, is ensuring non of the huge, expensive tools mentioned above are needed, it is possible to run through the application with any driver you want. The main thing needed in order to properly and solidly automate testing in SAP now, is a well grounded knowledge of the Business Processes the implementation is supporting (or driving).  This is no different than what is needed when automating SAP with SAP TAO. The benefits of having the option to choose your own drivers, your own programming language and your own reporting framework are huge. If SAP is merely in the organisation to support the business processes and software developers within the organisation are writing their own code in Erlang, C++, C#, Java, Ruby, Python or whatever else you can imagine, the testsuite for SAP can be in that same language. Having the automated testsuite in a well supported language rather than just in QTP’s own VBScript, ensures a larger possible support base for the automated tests. It enables easy integration of home-built software with the SAP systems since all tests can be built in one language and in an end-to-end setup, again supported by the organisation’s own development group. The SAP TAO and HPQC setup do have some benefits of course. First of all, there is a huge corporate support for both HP and SAP software products. But more importantly, there are some technical benefits of using SAP TAO, if the environment is setup properly. As mentioned above, there is this tool called the Business Process Change Analyser, or BPCA, which can help extract transaction based changes from a transport and help the tester decide, based on these changes, which test scenarios need to be run to effectively cover the business processes (or mainly the transactions associated both directly and indirectly to the transport). Next to that there is the benefit of using HPQC, I can hardly believe that I am saying this, since I am personally not a big fan of the HPQC suite, however the reporting possibilities and capabilities within HPQC are close to limitless. This means that it is possible to generate excellent reports, automatically, for both management level execs and for the business analysts and ABAP-specialists, on each test run without having to think about it. Having the full benefits of this setup however comes at a cost, a fairly sizable cost. The licensing for HPQC, QTP and SAP TAO or not to be ignored for starters. A hidden cost lays within the organisation, as stated, for the BPCA to do anything, Solution Manager needs to be utilized fully, the Blueprint needs to be ready and up to date, more over, it needs to be well maintained to ensure it remains the “Single Source of Truth” (as SAP coined it). So, to answer the initial question: Is SAP special? It is, as a business process tool, definitely special, strong and extremely versatile. When looking at SAP as a system that requires testing and test automation however, I am not convinced it is special, it’s just software, which is open for testautomation with a range of drivers, one of these drivers might be QTP. If you do indeed choose to go for QTP with a SAP system, have a look into SAP TAO. However, do not feel that it is the only one out there which can effectively and efficiently be used for SAP test automation. All the others claiming they can, probably indeed can just as well as SAP TAO with QTP. In the end it is all about how you use and abuse a tool and whether you use QTP, White or Panaya, they all in the end merely function as a driver, it is the code the testers build which matters!