Test your Packaged Applications Software

ERP (Enterprise Resouce Planning) software upgrades introduce significant risks into the core business of large organizations. Upward compatibility and business continuity are crucial. When existing packaged applications have to be modified, the most important risks relate to functional gaps that may appear between different implementations of the application across global locations or business units, which makes regression testing difficult.

Nevertheless, effective IT governance requires sufficient regression testing to ensure an upgrade's functional compatibility and continuity.

 

 Pitfalls for project stakeholders:

• Manual scripting and recording of actionable tests can be very costly and time-consuming, wich discourages early and frequent testing in projects. The cost of test implementation for each iteration in agile development can be prohibitive and lead to insufficient testing.
  
  
• Waiting for the ERP application to be ready for testing before designing and implementing tests is bad practice. The tests will not check alignment of the implemented applications on the initial ERP application design. Waiting also reduces the number of possible tests and leads to late detection of errors.
  
  
• Change management increases the risk of tests being out of line with the ERP application design. Keeping tests and applications aligned during change is usually difficult because they are typically managed in various processes that rely on independent technologies. Regression testing for test changes escalates change management costs.
  

AN ERP project's QA managers know that risks for regression due to changes in test cases and test scripts are high and that business layer application requirements should be independent of technology changes and implementation decisions.

Maintaining tests when business requirements change is costly, time-consuming, and degrades IT productivity and responsiveness. Smartesting improves regression testing productivity and reduces related risks.

The Smartesting solution generates tests independently of the application's technical implementation.

• First, Smartesting relies on the modeling of application behavior, which is not tied to technical changes. Tests based on the same modeling can be generated for various implementations, releases and versions of a single application which ensures efficient regression testing.
  

• Secondly,Smartesting facilitates business processes coverage before test execution is performed. Test derived from business requirements can be designed with Smartesting without needing to touch executable test scripts.
  
  

Smartesting mitigates ERP testing risk, by automating test generation based on application business modeling. It fully industrializes the test process, from Information System design to test design and from test design to test script implementation.

Smartesting interfaces with BMPN modeling tools and with the test management and automation tools. Automated generation ensures consistency of the application and test design, as well as consistency with test implementation.

Smartesting facilitates change management because it continually adds value when the application is being updated and once the tests have been modeled. The availability of a durable test repository significantly lowers the cost of regression testing.