The SAP environment and applications form the technology hub for many organizations. Out of the world’s 500 largest companies, 94 percent are SAP customers. The typical enterprise portfolio includes 2,000 to 3,000 applications in production—and an average transaction touches 83 different technologies. This complex, dynamic IT landscape presents significant challenges for QA teams.
Digital transformation initiatives such as S/4HANA transformations or DevOps can have a major impact on how we test, ensure, and manage quality. Traditional testing organizations continue to look for ways to increase speed and reduce costs. Test automation and continuous testing play an integral role in enabling these initiatives and bringing about positive changes.
One of the major steps in our 8 Step Guide to Modernizing Your Testing Organization is selecting the right operating model for your testing team. Why? Because this is were you determine how your testing organization will actually run. This is where you’ll establish accountability and communication needed to continue testing innovation and maintain best practices.
Accelerating your software delivery cycle is impossible unless you also accelerate and enhance your approach to software testing. In another article we described the eight steps of the journey to transform your organization into a modern testing organization. This article will focus on defining your test strategy. You’ll learn about the importance of adopting agile practices.
Why should you invest in software testing? And if you’ve already invested heavily in your testing program, why should you invest in modernizing your current practices and tools? If these are questions you’ve heard or asked yourself, take a cue from your peers, Gartner, and the World Quality Report. When you modernize your testing, you make it easier for IT staff and business stakeholders to collaborate in ways that lead to faster software delivery and better business outcomes.
Year after year, DevOps industry reports and practitioners in the field point to testing as the biggest bottleneck in the software development lifecycle. Take GitLab’s 2021 Global DevSecOps Survey – for the third year in a row, the majority of respondents pointed to testing as the biggest cause of delays. That’s a lot of finger-pointing. If we had to guess, testers are tired of it.
In the era of digital transformation, misalignment between the business leaders steering the overall strategy and the technical experts who build, implement, and maintain solutions is one of the top blockers to a successful sea change. These groups need to be able to collaborate to define what each solution requires and the why behind it.
