Continuous testing tools vendor, Tricentis, has released the latest version of Tricentis Tosca v11.2. This version of the software adds support for the latest versions of software from SAP. Among the products Tosca 11.2 delivers testing for are: S/4 HANA, Fiori 2.0, SAP API, SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Hybris, SAP Concur, SAP Ariba, SAP Fiori and SAP BI/BW.

There is an increasing move towards continuous delivery among SAP customers. The age of once yearly software updates has passed. Organisations want, and users demand, regular updates. Some SAP partners in the DevOps space are reporting demand for fortnightly releases from SAP customers. As SAP moves to the cloud, this demand will grow. The problem for most SAP environments in meeting this demand is the complexity of their software environments which makes testing challenging.

Dr Gerd Weishaar, Chief Product Officer for Tricentis said: “Recent advancements of S/4 HANA and Fiori 2.0 enable the agile, modular, and distributed enterprise application environment necessary for successful digital transformation. A new approach to testing, called continuous testing, is required to yield these transformation benefits.

“Conventional software testing approaches, built for prior generations of SAP applications, simply can’t keep up with today’s modern SAP environments. Tricentis has been declared the number one platform for continuous testing SAP solutions.”

What is in Tricentis Tosca 11.2?

The improvements in Tricentis Tosca 11.2 are around both products and approaches to testing. This includes:

New test automation approach for S/4 HANA and Fiori 2.0: Organisations upgrading to the latest versions of S/4 HANA and Fiori 2.0 will need to rebuild their test suites. Tosca 11.2 is aimed at simplifying the construction of automated tests. This will enable customers to develop and adapt tests quickly so that they can add continuous testing.

SAP Fiori load testing – Tricentis Flood: Cloud, multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments mean that components are highly distributed. This creates the risk of performance bottlenecks which will impact all systems. Tricentis Flood allows customers to import their existing Tricentis scriptless functional test cases. Alternatively they can upload JMeter, Gatling or Selenium load test plans. This allows customers to create load tests at multiple points in the application to identify and resolve bottlenecks. By integrating with continuous testing, bottlenecks can be spotted and eliminated before products are deployed into production.

Test automation for SAP Success Factor, SAP Ariba and SAP Hybris: Tosca 11.2 delivers test automation support for these solutions. It means that organisations can do end-to-end testing of their business processes.

Automated testing for SAP Data Warehousing: As enterprises increase the amount of data held and its usage, ETL and BI become hard to keep in sync. Tosca 11.2 contains new automated testing components for SAP Data Warehousing including SAP BW/4HANA.

Branching and merging tests: SAP developers do not work on a single linear development line. They are often working in multiple parallel development lines that get branched and merged. Tosca allows customers to branch off code into smaller projects and then merge back into the main code stream and software repositories.

Mobile Testing: Tosca 11.2 includes Perfecto’s Continuous Quality Lab allowing it to test across large number of mobile devices without them having to be in the test lab.

What does this mean

Faster software development and delivery requires DevOps. One of the keys to effective DevOps is continuous testing. It allows developers to create pipelines that don’t allow untested or unproven code to enter the code repository. This means that increased speed of development and testing leads to increased speed of deployment into production environments.

As SAP moves towards its goal of all customers using cloud software by 2021, it needs partners to help deliver the tools to make it happen. DevOps requires continuous development and testing tools to be effective. With Tosca 11.2, Tricentis is looking to position itself as the test partner of choice for SAP customers who are struggling to increase the speed of software delivery and move to the cloud.