The SAP means Systems, Applications and Products in data processing. It provides the ability to customers, to interact with the corporate databases for a comprehensive range of applications. The SAP testing is application testing. Here the application is SAP ERP software. ERP is Enterprise Resource Planning. The customers can run the business process using ERP software.
SAP was started by five former employees of IBM, in the year 1972, in Germany. The various versions are released since then, R/1, R/2, R/3, mySAP, SAP netWeaver, SAP business suite.
In SAP testing, the functional knowledge you acquire is portable and can be used in other projects. For example, if you are switching job in your old company or if you were testing billing software for telecom service provider, what is the possibility that the same project is available in your new company. Now in case, that your are switching from SAP testing project to another SAP testing project in your new company. You instantly recognise the GUI, transaction codes, vanilla business workflows. You have to learn the customisation made by the customer but still should have the deep knowledge about the software.
Consider an example, for SAP implementation that the company A will provide 10 leaves to an employee and company B will provide 20 annual leaves for an employee. The salary should be deducted if an employee processes for 12th or 13th leave. This information must be passed to SAP systems which is SAP implementation and configuration.
SAP: End to end lifecycle
There are many methodologies that you can use for SAP implementation. They are:
- ASAP Implementation(for very first level of implementation of SAP systems and porting from legacy systems)
- Maintenance Life Cycle
- Upgrade life cycle
- Custom development life cycle.
In whichever, the life cycle you may be working there are three different testing phases.
- Test Preparation
- Test execution Phase
- Test evaluation phase