Articles
8/9/2022
10 minutes

Managing Test Data On SAP Environments At High Speeds And Reduced Risk

Written by
Copado Team
Table of contents

In this ever-changing world, organizations face more complex IT landscapes than ever before. Whether you have customers to make happy, or suppliers to keep in line with your internal processes, engaging with the external world has dramatically evolved, becoming increasingly digital.

Large organizations are struggling to keep pace with the demand for better products and services while fierce competition from disruptive startups with no legacy IT landscapes has seen the fall of large enterprises unable to adapt in time to their new competition. We only need to look at the rapid rise of Facebook, AirBnB, Uber, and Netflix to understand how quickly the industry can change.

Becoming and staying innovative is key as well as highly dependent on technology solutions that are scalable, reliable, and flexible enough to ensure that IT departments can deliver business value fast in this highly competitive market.

Companies of all sizes face these challenges on a daily basis, and large organizations that adopt complex ERP systems for their mission-critical operations put their businesses at high risk while trying to find a balance between ensuring the quality of those systems is not compromised and simultaneously coping with the demands of remaining competitive. The premise is simple – if you want to stay innovative and competitive, you must keep up with the pace while safeguarding the quality of your mission-critical systems while you do so.

The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new- Socrates.

This is a challenge that most SAP customers today are facing. Moreover, SAP systems and IT architectures are increasing in complexity. New technologies allow organizations to distribute goods and services in a multichannel ecosystem, e.g. a webshop, social media, mobile, and even IoT extending the digital tentacles of IT systems and increasing the chances of failure. It is then paramount that organizations test the quality of their applications extensively using production-like data and reducing the risk of increasing the frequency of changes into their mission-critical systems.

Challenges to test and deploy changes to SAP systems

As mentioned previously, change is inevitable – at least if you want to stay competitive in business. The question remains on how frequently your organization can change especially when having complex IT systems such as SAP. So, what are the challenges faced while introducing change?

IT organizations typically follow a five-step process to implement changes to their SAP systems:

  1. Prototype changes in a sandbox environment that isolates the new code from production.
  2. Unit test those changes in a development environment to ensure transactions are working within each affected module – S/4 Hana, BI, FIORI, ECC, CRM, etc.
  3. Release the changes that pass unit testing to QA for integration testing to ensure transactions align and flow properly across ECC, CRM, SRM, and other SAP systems. For example, if a sales order is received, it might need to trigger an inventory check, plant notification, etc.
  4. Validate new features and changes in the pre-production environment, involving key users (User Acceptance testing - UAT).
  5. Once UAT is complete and successful, promote changes to production for implementation.

CHALLENGE 1: Change Can (and Will) Disrupt Operations

What we typically see in our customers is that their SAP implementations run the majority of their core business processes, if not all of the core business processes. This means that any downtime or disruption can have far-reaching repercussions. If the right quality measures are not implemented during the change process, this can result in a severe impact on ongoing business operations potentially losing revenue and providing a poor customer experience.

Failures at the core business processes that drive an organization are simply unacceptable.

CHALLENGE 2: The Dependency on Data is Real; And It’s High!

Being able to introduce changes in SAP landscapes has a high dependency on the quality of the data in your systems – in SAP terms, master data. Companies face constant challenges in having up-to-date data in SAP systems. Moreover, customer data increases in size exponentially over time, introducing unnecessary infrastructure costs that could be otherwise eliminated.

Customers need to have relevant, valid data that can be copied quickly and effectively across a variety of platforms. They need to provide instant sand-boxes to let developers create and test new and innovative software and applications. Many companies face a backlog of development as developers fight for limited test resources. The cost of setting up databases for testing is prohibitive and time-consuming.

‍The time and effort it takes to perform a regression test is also expensive. On top of that, data compliance is not just a hot topic but also a legal one. Customers demand to be able to immediately mask or scramble critical and confidential data to ensure all privacy laws are being met.

CHALLENGE 3: Manual Operations are Slow, Costly and Untenable

Changing business processes and moving data across your systems’ landscape are very resource-intensive endeavors. These activities need to be repeated at every change event. The more frequent the change cycles are, the more effort the organization will incur on their employees – this is just not scalable.

All in all, conducting these activities manually introduce challenges on:

  • System downtime (both source and target systems)
  • Error-prone manual operations and coordination
  • Resource & effort-intensive to deliver an SAP environment
  • Automation is no longer a nice to have, it’s a necessity for being competitive.

Our Fully Automated Solution: Copado

Copado (formerly Qualibrate) deeply understands those challenges and delivers an end-to-end solution to help address the pain-points faced when introducing chance in SAP landscapes at high speeds without sacrificing quality in the process. The integrated solution helps organizations deploy fully tested, fully documented SAP non-production environments with scrambled, anonymized data in hours instead of months.

‍The integration of Copado offers:

  • Full orchestration by automating operations for SAP data copies, reducing the chance of errors during execution
  • Ability to create templates for moving data across the landscape
  • Reduce the risk by validating target for data and functional integrity
  • Selective extraction of production data to reduce data-footprint on non-production environments
  • Scrambling and masking to ensure GDPR compliance on non-production systems
  • Ability to copy entire systems or selected client

 

Qlik Gold Client & Copado solution for SAP test data management

Use Case 1: Production Emergency Fixes

Several studies prove the fact that finding and fixing a defect in later stages of the SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) can cost up to 30x times more that if found and fixed during the early phases of the delivery process. The high cost of emergency fixes is due to the long time needed for highly-skilled and expensive developers to duplicate production data in a test environment before remediation can even begin.

This integrated solution offers customers the ability to easily and rapidly provision a test environment by isolating and importing production data into a new test environment. Developers can then quickly reproduce the issue, implement a fix, test it, and redeploy a patch in production.

Use Case 2: On-Demand Test Data Management

In a production environment, the life cycle of the data stored in the system is very well controlled and managed. However, the same is not true for non-production systems like quality and development environments, where data creation and deletion is often out of control.

This introduces several issues with data integrity and inconsistency, especially on test environments that require pristine sets of data to be used for regression or acceptance testing.

‍With Copado you can refresh data snapshots as many times as you want and transform your test data to a state that teams can easily manage.

Use Case 3: GDPR Compliance

Managing production data is a risky business, especially in the context of new regulations around protecting sensitive data from any people that interact with your organization and systems.

Copado offers capabilities to ensure that any sensitive data moved from a production system to a non-production landscape is always anonymized by using masking and scrambling techniques.

 

 

Book a demo

About The Author

#1 DevOps Platform for Salesforce

We Build Unstoppable Teams By Equipping DevOps Professionals With The Platform, Tools And Training They Need To Make Release Days Obsolete. Work Smarter, Not Longer.

Making DevOps Easier and Faster with AI
Chapter 5: Automated Testing
Reimagining Salesforce Development with Copado's AI-Powered Platform
Planning User Acceptance Testing (UAT): Tips and Tricks for a Smooth and Enjoyable UAT
What is DevOps for Business Applications
Copado Integrates Powerful AI Solutions into Its Community as It Surpasses the 100,000 Member Milestone
Testing End-to-End Salesforce Flows: Web and Mobile Applications
How to get non-technical users onboard with Salesforce UAT testing
DevOps Excellence within Salesforce Ecosystem
Best Practices for AI in Salesforce Testing
6 testing metrics that’ll speed up your Salesforce release velocity (and how to track them)
Chapter 4: Manual Testing Overview
AI Driven Testing for Salesforce
AI-powered Planning for Salesforce Development
Chapter 3: Testing Fun-damentals
Salesforce Deployment: Avoid Common Pitfalls with AI-Powered Release Management
Exploring DevOps for Different Types of Salesforce Clouds
Copado Launches Suite of AI Agents to Transform Business Application Delivery
What’s Special About Testing Salesforce? - Chapter 2
Why Test Salesforce? - Chapter 1
Continuous Integration for Salesforce Development
Comparing Top AI Testing Tools for Salesforce
Avoid Deployment Conflicts with Copado’s Selective Commit Feature: A New Way to Handle Overlapping Changes
From Learner to Leader: Journey to Copado Champion of the Year
Enhancing Salesforce Security with AppOmni and Copado Integration: Insights, Uses and Best Practices
The Future of Salesforce DevOps: Leveraging AI for Efficient Conflict Management
A Guide to Using AI for Salesforce Development Issues
How to Sync Salesforce Environments with Back Promotions
Copado and Wipro Team Up to Transform Salesforce DevOps
DevOps Needs for Operations in China: Salesforce on Alibaba Cloud
What is Salesforce Deployment Automation? How to Use Salesforce Automation Tools
Maximizing Copado's Cooperation with Essential Salesforce Instruments
Future Trends in Salesforce DevOps: What Architects Need to Know
From Chaos to Clarity: Managing Salesforce Environment Merges and Consolidations
Enhancing Customer Service with CopadoGPT Technology
What is Efficient Low Code Deployment?
Copado Launches Test Copilot to Deliver AI-powered Rapid Test Creation
Cloud-Native Testing Automation: A Comprehensive Guide
A Guide to Effective Change Management in Salesforce for DevOps Teams
Building a Scalable Governance Framework for Sustainable Value
Copado Launches Copado Explorer to Simplify and Streamline Testing on Salesforce
Exploring Top Cloud Automation Testing Tools
Master Salesforce DevOps with Copado Robotic Testing
Exploratory Testing vs. Automated Testing: Finding the Right Balance
A Guide to Salesforce Source Control
A Guide to DevOps Branching Strategies
Family Time vs. Mobile App Release Days: Can Test Automation Help Us Have Both?
How to Resolve Salesforce Merge Conflicts: A Guide
Copado Expands Beta Access to CopadoGPT for All Customers, Revolutionizing SaaS DevOps with AI
Is Mobile Test Automation Unnecessarily Hard? A Guide to Simplify Mobile Test Automation
From Silos to Streamlined Development: Tarun’s Tale of DevOps Success
Simplified Scaling: 10 Ways to Grow Your Salesforce Development Practice
What is Salesforce Incident Management?
What Is Automated Salesforce Testing? Choosing the Right Automation Tool for Salesforce
Copado Appoints Seasoned Sales Executive Bob Grewal to Chief Revenue Officer
Business Benefits of DevOps: A Guide
Copado Brings Generative AI to Its DevOps Platform to Improve Software Development for Enterprise SaaS
Celebrating 10 Years of Copado: A Decade of DevOps Evolution and Growth
Copado Celebrates 10 Years of DevOps for Enterprise SaaS Solutions
5 Reasons Why Copado = Less Divorces for Developers
What is DevOps? Build a Successful DevOps Ecosystem with Copado’s Best Practices
Scaling App Development While Meeting Security Standards
5 Data Deploy Features You Don’t Want to Miss
Top 5 Reasons I Choose Copado for Salesforce Development
How to Elevate Customer Experiences with Automated Testing
Getting Started With Value Stream Maps
Copado and nCino Partner to Provide Proven DevOps Tools for Financial Institutions
Unlocking Success with Copado: Mission-Critical Tools for Developers
How Automated Testing Enables DevOps Efficiency
How to Keep Salesforce Sandboxes in Sync
How to Switch from Manual to Automated Testing with Robotic Testing
Best Practices to Prevent Merge Conflicts with Copado 1 Platform
Software Bugs: The Three Causes of Programming Errors
How Does Copado Solve Release Readiness Roadblocks?
Why I Choose Copado Robotic Testing for my Test Automation
How to schedule a Function and Job Template in DevOps: A Step-by-Step Guide
Delivering Quality nCino Experiences with Automated Deployments and Testing
Best Practices Matter for Accelerated Salesforce Release Management
Maximize Your Code Quality, Security and performance with Copado Salesforce Code Analyzer
Upgrade Your Test Automation Game: The Benefits of Switching from Selenium to a More Advanced Platform
Three Takeaways From Copa Community Day
Cloud Native Applications: 5 Characteristics to Look for in the Right Tools
Using Salesforce nCino Architecture for Best Testing Results
How To Develop A Salesforce Testing Strategy For Your Enterprise
What Is Multi Cloud: Key Use Cases and Benefits for Enterprise Settings
5 Steps to Building a Salesforce Center of Excellence for Government Agencies
Salesforce UI testing: Benefits to Staying on Top of Updates
Benefits of UI Test Automation and Why You Should Care
Types of Salesforce Testing and When To Use Them
Copado + DataColada: Enabling CI/CD for Developers Across APAC
What is Salesforce API Testing and It Why Should Be Automated
Machine Learning Models: Adapting Data Patterns With Copado For AI Test Automation
Automated Testing Benefits: The Case For As Little Manual Testing As Possible
Beyond Selenium: Low Code Testing To Maximize Speed and Quality
UI Testing Best Practices: From Implementation to Automation
How Agile Test Automation Helps You Develop Better and Faster
Salesforce Test Cases: Knowing When to Test
DevOps Quality Assurance: Major Pitfalls and Challenges
11 Characteristics of Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) That Set Them Apart
7 Key Compliance Regulations Relating to Data Storage
Go back to resources
There is no previous posts
Go back to resources
There is no next posts

Explore more about

No items found.
Articles
December 6, 2024
Making DevOps Easier and Faster with AI
Articles
November 19, 2024
Chapter 5: Automated Testing
Articles
November 18, 2024
Reimagining Salesforce Development with Copado's AI-Powered Platform
Articles
November 8, 2024
Planning User Acceptance Testing (UAT): Tips and Tricks for a Smooth and Enjoyable UAT

Activate AI — Accelerate DevOps

Release Faster, Eliminate Risk, and Enjoy Your Work.
Try Copado Devops.

Resources

Level up your Salesforce DevOps skills with our resource library.

Upcoming Events & Webinars

Learn More

E-Books and Whitepapers

Learn More

Support and Documentation

Learn More

Demo Library

Learn More