The role of Test Accelerators in ERP Testing

ERP Testing

The growing competition among businesses is leading them to implement robust ERP solutions. This is done to streamline processes, monitor inventories, manage resources, and leverage databases to help the stakeholders take business critical decisions. Every business department has an inherent way of functioning, which may or may not be in league with the other departments. This often leads to compatibility issues - especially when it comes to following of common protocols or standards. If left to their own, each department working in silos and at its own pace can create bottlenecks and hinder achieving a common objective.

With ERP solutions, the various arms of a business viz., accounts, operations, sales, HR, production, or marketing can work in tandem based on common objectives, protocols, and benchmarks. The criticality of ERP in realizing ROI and other business objectives necessitates its testing before implementation. Since the business outcomes depend on the successful running of an ERP software, it should be tested comprehensively and with considerable rigour.

A comprehensive and rigorous ERP testing methodology needs test automation to realize its true potential. However, the prevalence of a poor test automation environment, non-availability of skilled resources, and high cost of automation tools can limit the effectiveness of test automation. Moreover, implementing an ERP solution can leave a company with challenges leading to time and cost overruns. While test automation helps in identifying and plugging errors in the software codes, shortening the SDLC, accelerating the time to market, and creating a robust test framework to enable future testing, - test accelerators can accelerate activities such as functional and regression testing. The use of test automation accelerators as part of the ERP testing services leads to an end to end test automation covering a slew of technologies.

Why ERP?

Businesses go through a host of transformational activities such as mergers, acquisitions, and takeovers making the management of databases a tedious and complex exercise. Moreover, businesses need to rationalize their operational costs, streamline their processes, estimate the market trends, manage inventories, sharpen their delivery and feedback mechanism and strategize to remain competitive. All these and more can be achieved effectively through the implementation of ERP solutions such as SAP, Salesforce and others.

How can test accelerators help in ERP testing?

Since ERP solutions facilitate the integration and streamlining of various processes, branches, and departments of a business, they are needed to be tested thoroughly. ERP testing should encompass a broad range of testing activities such as performance testing, regression testing, integration testing, functional testing and security testing. The challenge in choosing an automated ERP testing platform and writing robust test scripts that validate functions and processes is that it requires the use of test accelerators. These frameworks help the ERP testing experts to execute automation at the early stages of development. Since test accelerators help in cutting down the complexities associated with test automation, they can enable other business stakeholders to be a part of testing. These help test experts to validate the pieces of codes across the entire SDLC phalanx and technology platforms.

Let us find out how test accelerators can support ERP software testing.

Accelerating the time to market: In the Agile or DevOps setup, test accelerators help to speedily develop, test, integrate, and deliver applications. The frequent release of glitch free applications can drastically reduce the cost, time, and effort that would otherwise had gone into rework. Test accelerators can help experts to monitor the quality metrics in an effective manner.

Better quality software: Test accelerators can execute comprehensive testing of the various arms of an ERP software. These can detect glitches right at the beginning of the development of a software. The speeding up of shift left testing can lead to better integration and delivery of a product. In the ultimate analysis, this helps businesses to stay competitive and achieve ROI.

Optimizing test automation framework: The use of test accelerators can pre-empt the development of a test automation platform right from the inception stage. These facilitate the writing of automated test scripts based on the logical flow of test cases. Test accelerators can drastically cut down the time spent on developing test scripts besides reducing the licensing costs.

Conclusion

 

ERP implementation can be taxing for an organization given the inherent challenges. These relate to the presence of complex technologies and multiple applications, and regulatory and compliance issues among others. These can invariably slow down the testing process leading the business to lose its competitive edge. However, test accelerators, by automating various aspects of testing, can help in managing cost and accelerate the time to market.

This Article is originally published at Medium.com, How can Test Accelerators support ERP Testing?