Dynamic functional end-to-end testing in the case of SAP e-commerce
Petri T. Niemelä · 2014
Software testing is an important part of software development projects. As the role of information technology (IT) becomes bigger and bigger in our everyday activities, it is clear that business operations and human well-being are dependent on information systems. To efficiently operate and run a business, companies reflect their processes to IT systems. A business process can cover many different organizational units, both in real life and in the IT system. Organizational units can have their own separate IT system modules implemented, and data flows from module to module via interfaces. To ensure the correct functionality of the business process, end-to-end testing of the complete process across the IT systems is required. With the advancement of technology, it has been a trend to replace human work with machines. Same applies to software testing, where repetitive testing tasks and otherwise manually unfeasible test activities are automated to be run by a machine. To achieve this, a test automation tool needs to be able to simulate real usage in the system under test. As systems consist of multiple modules and technologies, it is a challenge for the test tool to support such a technical variety. In many companies, such a heterogeneous system landscape includes software implemented by SAP AG, one of the world’s largest software manufacturers. This work presents an end-to-end business process test automation library for an SAP e-commerce environment. The test library enables to extend the normal test automation of a web shop to cover the back-end processing of the SAP system as well. This is achieved by building a test library on top of SAP’s communication methods. The test library is driven from a common keyworddriven test automation framework, Robot Framework. In this work, the related research and technologies for the implementation are discussed and presented. The design is demonstrated, and the implementation process is described in detail. Other known approaches to SAP test automation are introduced, and when compared, no other similar test tools were found available with such ease of operational deployment. Test results and live project usage of the test library show that the library works as expected. The performance is also promising, not having a noticeable impact on the total test execution duration. There are a lot of future development possibilities to further extend the usage of the test library in SAP test automation.