After staying out of the news for almost a year, Optus is in the news again. This time for a nationwide mobile services and internet outage affecting millions of customers, thousands of businesses, essential services, rail networks, banking services, and more. It's not a good look for the second-largest mobile carrier in the country, whose 2022 data breach is still fresh in everyone’s minds.

What is particularly concerning is that after almost 8 hours, the provider’s CEO, Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, was reported to have said that the company still didn’t have a line of sight into the root cause.

Since then, things like network and infrastructure issues, planned upgrade problems, and a potential cyber attack have all been mooted. Perhaps it was simply due to poorly targeted or inadequate testing - time will reveal all.

In the meantime, it gives us a good opportunity to talk about software testing and why it can be hard to get right.

Why testing fails to protect SAP production systems.

Among others, here are three reasons why testing fails to protect SAP production systems.

• Time pressure
• Resource availability
• Poor test targeting

Time

Firstly, time pressure is often a reason behind poor or inadequate testing.

Testing is one of the bottlenecks to speedy delivery. Essential upgrades, enhancements or functionality are usually required yesterday. Pressure is then placed on IT teams to get through the test phase quickly. Often leading to shortcuts or quick testing, both of which can result in serious Production system incidents.

Automation is the key to overcoming time pressure.

Resources

Next, skilled resources are usually required to perform high-quality testing.

Quality testing requires people familiar with the SAP systems, the software, the deployed changes, and the automation tools. When key people are unavailable, overworked, or absent, testing quality suffers.

Simple, easy-to-use tools reduce reliance on skilled resources.

Targeting

Finally, quality testing relies on knowing where to test and what to look for.

Often, this leads to a one-size-fits-all test scenario where a series of tests are assumed to pick up any faults. The problem here is that this takes time and might still miss the mark. Intelligent impact assessment will help target testing in the right areas, removing the guesswork and pointing testing to where things will go wrong rather than where they might go wrong.

A way forward for SAP teams

Testing that minimises reliance on highly trained people and is targeted can reduce the testing bottleneck and improve the team’s confidence.

Firstly, on the people side.

If spreadsheets and manual processes are used, there is the first place to start. The next place is the tool itself. Many require a team of experts to use and maintain them. However, a test automation solution that is easy to use, a snap to configure, and simple to maintain significantly reduces reliance on skilled people. The automation will enable a greater range of targeted tests to be performed in shorter time frames, reducing the time changes spent in the test phase of development.

Secondly, understanding the impact of a change is essential.

Understanding the impact of changes before migration to show teams where to target the testing will help. For example, suppose a set of security patches are required to be introduced, any one of which could break something. By understanding the specific impact of each patch, teams can discern which to hold back, which to promote, and where to test. However, without a particular tool to help, this is nigh impossible in some cases.

We can help.

Leg Up Software are expert in SAP IT operational and infrastructure software automation solutions, including test automation and impact assessment tools.

We know the SAP operations and infrastructure automation solutions landscape and have already done the legwork identifying the best solutions for most SAP operational automation applications.

We have excellent relationships with many software vendors and can negotiate an evaluation process that best suits your circumstances and budget.

Why not set up a time to start the conversation by putting something in our calendar?

Make time to talk with Rick

Alternatively, to learn more about IT automation for SAP teams see www.legupsoftware.com/solutions