Automation of finance regression testing
A joint global IT and Accenture Finance team selected the Worksoft Automation Platform to automate testing. A core automation team was formed to provide governance and support, and functional SAP teams were trained to automate the test scenarios. The new automation capabilities enabled the global IT testing teams to work through changing over from manual to automated ways by business priority. Today, most functional and regression testing is fully automated. System validations are fully automated as well.
Automation of SAP S/4HANA and upgrade deployments
Drawing on the regression testing experience, test automation was a key enabler to Accenture’s successful original implementation to SAP Business Suite on HANA, followed by SAP S/4HANA. Testing the new functionality of the SAP S/4HANA software necessitated having to remediate existing automated test scripts as well as creating new ones to test new functionality.
Global IT also executed a parallel financial close impact test, comparing Accenture’s financial results processed in SAP Business Suite on HANA and SAP S/4HANA to ensure the ongoing integrity of Accenture’s financial results. In addition, global IT was involved in automating 50 cutover activities, practicing cutover 16 times to progressively reduce the amount of cutover time and to confirm execution quality. These efforts contributed significantly to reducing cutover time by 40 to 50 percent of the total duration of manual cutover actions and enabled a high-quality cutover. A final area of automation was the automation of testing the 120 SAP S/4HANA-impacted security roles, uncovering 92 defects in the process that were remediated.
The team continues to perform what Accenture calls business impact testing. It is a test that compares the processes of the current version of SAP S/4HANA in production with new releases of code and data changes to understand impacts to the business, if any.
The same automated testing assets were used for a subsequent upgrade to SAP S/4HANA version 1809. For this upgrade, the team tested the new capabilities with automated scripts with minimal remediation. This automated testing saved a significant number of manual hours of effort and identified SAP system defects—none of which appeared once Accenture was in production—enabling a high-quality outcome.