Enterprise Performance Testing: A critical element of the SAP Activate methodology

By December 2027, all SAP customers are required to have migrated to its S/4HANA platform. To streamline this mandatory migration, SAP developed its SAP Activate methodology.

The methodology itself is broken down into six key phases as shown below:

When we examine these phases through a quality lens, focused on ensuring that the outcome is a highly performant and scalable system – we find that the need for Enterprise Performance Testing is critical at every stage.

Stage 1: Discover

The goal of the Discovery Assessment phase is to define the overall outline, scope, and business objectives of the SAP project. Scope is also a critical component of the performance testing plan. If your organization practices continuous testing, all required data has already been collected. If not, you must establish a baseline to facilitate actionable metrics.

Testing the performance of the existing system to collect baseline data is a vital part of the performance analysis and recommendations processes. Without data there will instead be a reliance on human perception, which is notoriously unreliable. Do you have data benchmarks in place? If not, this is the time to establish them.

Stage 2: Prepare

During the Setup and Enablement phase, your system will be provisioned as key team members are identified and enabled for the implementation. Performance testing at this stage validates the setup and configuration of the new system in an unaltered state, allowing changes to be meaningfully measured over time.

Establishing performance testing practices also ensures that not only is the system properly configured for new development, but also that the performance engineering team is equipped to test properly on an ongoing basis. Without the implementation of performance testing practices at the Prepare stage, it will be much more difficult to assess the impact of changes over time.

Stage 3: Explore

The Fit to Standard Analysis sessions during the Explore phase are designed to ensure that the business owners understand and agree to the proposed changes. These sessions generally focus on the data and process flow through SAP, highlighting improvements. Active performance testing during this phase ensures that not only are existing processes tested, but also that the performance engineering team understands the changes to be made – and thus understands where test modification will be required.

Performance requirements and goals should be established at this stage, to ensure that they are realistic and agreed upon. Running a performance engineering effort without clear goals — or worse, unrealistic goals — is extremely unpleasant.

Stage 4: Realize

At the Realize phase, SAP underscores the need for a dedicated testing cycle. Continuous performance means that changes are tested regardless of size or scope to ensure that regressions related to performance or scalability aren’t introduced into the system. The continuous nature of this process also ensures that the performance engineering team works in small batches when tasked with updating their tests to match changes.

The benefits of this approach are numerous, but faster detection of performance regression issues is most impactful. The velocity of the testing effort, the limitation of scope to small changesets, and the simplicity of multiple small updates vs. large-scale recreation of assets streamline every part of a performance engineering effort.

Stage 5: Deploy

All too often, organizations only leverage performance engineering to validate the infrastructure and deployment of the changed system into production. This is a valuable exercise, but it should not be viewed as the most important aspect of performance testing in your SAP Activate project.

The value in creating highly scalable and reliable software components to be delivered into production is that your system will then be highly scalable and reliable. Now is the time to validate, at scale, that the production deployment is ready for release to users by taking the test assets that have been created at earlier phases and running a full production-sized load test. This validates that the system will behave as intended, that the infrastructure is sufficient, and that the response times and end-user experience meet stated goals.

It’s important to note that this step should be to validate that performance is meeting the standards that were outlined and that performance is comparable to or better than the system prior to changes. It is not an exploration of system performance, which should happen in the Discovery phase.

Stage 6: Run

Post-deployment, users are unleashed into the altered system and begin reporting feedback, and fixes are deployed rapidly to remediate reported issues. Each of these changes needs to be continually performance tested to ensure that no performance regressions are introduced. By continuously performance testing your SAP system, any performance degradation that’s introduced is immediately identified and corrected before it goes to production.

Summary

Performance engineering in an SAP environment is not a single activity, but a continuous process that refines and improves the system on an ongoing basis. The business benefits of a highly tuned system are numerous, but include reduced costs, improved customer engagement, increased revenue, and higher business agility. A continuous performance effort also streamlines future performance testing efforts.

SAP recommends Enterprise Performance Testing (EPT) by Tricentis for testing all aspects of an SAP platform. Tricentis EPT is part of the SAP Solution Extension program, which recommends products that have been validated and certified by SAP.

Want to learn more about the Tricentis Enterprise Continuous Testing? Watch a 5-minute overview, or download our eBook Enterprise Continuous Testing: Transforming Testing for Agile and DevOps. Interested in Tricentis NeoLoad, the engine behind Tricentis EPT? Try it for free!