As experts in quality assurance with strong expertise and experience
in SAP systems, the government organisation selected Planit as its
approved testing services provider.
First, we worked with them to devise a test strategy. Since it is not
possible to test every single business process in the limited time
available, the priority then was to test the critical processes so that
business continuity is ensured after the upgrade.
A risk-based approach was adopted for the testing. This enabled us
to deliver optimal test coverage and quality results on critical business
processes covering all WRICEF (workflows, reports, interfaces,
conversions, enhancements, forms, and authorisations) areas, while
also reducing the cost and workload constraints to the government
organisation.
Our next step was to perform a review of their SAP landscape and
provide a testing framework that could be followed for the different
projects. This was important given the modularised nature of SAP
systems with components rarely able to be tested individually.
We engaged with the different business areas (procurement, finance,
human resources, payroll, asset works and management, and data and
reporting analytics) to map the government department’s end-to-end
business critical processes. This enabled us to determine the testing
requirements.
Our team carried out functional, system, system integration (SIT), user
acceptance (UAT), product validation (PVT), and smoke unit testing of
the patches applied to their ECC environment. Due to the quantity of
the changes from SAP required to ensure compliance, the project was
completed in two phases.
During phase one of the patching, several modules within the ECC
setup were patched using support packages. This consisted of
over 8,000 SAP “notes” or fixes that corrected general problems,
security flaws, legal requirements, and improved functionality. As part
of this testing, SAP Single Sign-On, which enables users to log in once
to securely access all the software they require with no need to log in
again, was also assessed.
The second phase of the project involved implementing various SAP
legislative changes, fixes for that financial year, and setup for the
following year’s processing.