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Energy Leader

$300B+ energy leader turbocharges SAP test automation, reducing risk and cost

Company overview

“Tricentis is an enabler to speedy delivery. Tricentis addresses the top technical challenge of delivering software faster: the need to support faster time-to-market with higher quality.”

Quality Manager

$300B+ energy leader turbocharges SAP test automation, reducing risk and cost

CHALLENGES

Reduce production defects resulting from the growing number (and frequency) of changes in the SAP landscape.

SOLUTION

Tricentis Tosca

 

Empowering business users to control their own test automation—across and beyond SAP

Background

IT must do much more than “keep the lights on” at one of the world’s largest energy companies. Digital transformation is the future of the business, and IT is essential for tapping new opportunities, increasing operational efficiency, and disrupting the energy industry with market-leading innovations. Agility and constant optimization are key—but it’s hard to move fast when your $300B+ business relies on an insanely complex web of over 5,000 applications spanning SAP (Fiori, WebDynpro, WinGUI), Petrel, SalesForce, Siebel, APIs, and all sorts of custom desktop applications.

As the pace of change increased—especially in the SAP systems at the core of the business—it exacerbated a longstanding pain point: the limitations of their legacy testing process. Knowing that manual testing by business users could never achieve the desired risk reduction, speed, or scale, they had previously tried to adopt a common test automation solution, HP UFT. The problem: script-based test automation was difficult to create and maintain, and it frequently broke with each application change. As a result, automated testing was limited, and an unacceptable number of defects slipped into production. Making matters worse, the testing was extremely slow and limited the pace of innovation. For example, some divisions wanted to release SAP transports daily, but had to hold back because testing cycles routinely took 6-8 weeks.

Challenges

  • 5,000 applications, 150-215 active projects
  • Geographically-distributed QA organization across EMEA, AMS, LATAM, APAC
  • Limited pockets of test automation across selected SAP areas
  • Unacceptable defect leakage in a highly-regulated industry
  • HP UFT test scripts based on .NET were difficult to create, maintain, and execute
  • Even “automated” tests required a user to be present from start to finish
  • Minimal reuse of test logic and test data limited scope and complicated automation expansion
  • Extreme duplication meant that a single change required massive updates
  • Automated test results were not trusted, deepening the dependence on manual testing

CHALLENGES

Reduce production defects resulting from the growing number (and frequency) of changes in the SAP landscape.

SOLUTION

Tricentis Tosca

Solution

The company’s quality leaders decided to cut their losses with HP UFT and kicked off a broad testing transformation. Their goal was to enable “quality @ speed” through high levels of test automation across their complex end-to-end business processes. To accomplish this, business users needed an easy way to create end-to-end automated tests for their diverse application stacks. Changes could then be tested quickly and completely, with minimal disruption to a business user’s regular responsibilities. After an extensive search and “proof of concept,” Tricentis Tosca stood out as the perfect solution.

Since their earlier attempt at test automation with HP UFT failed, the company anticipated skepticism when rolling out a new automation solution. They started by reaching out to the teams that were most frustrated with UFT and encouraged them to try Tricentis Tosca instead. The teams used Tosca’s risk-based testing and test case design technologies to determine which of their existing tests provided the greatest value, then converted them to Tricentis’ model-based test automation to ensure extreme reuse and resiliency. The early results were impressive and led to Tosca being adopted across the entire enterprise within a year.

Now, with 25X faster testing cycles, 2.8x higher risk coverage, and 75% cost savings, IT initiatives are rolled out at an accelerated pace and additional resources are available to fuel continued innovation.

  • Arrow Icon“What warmed my heart is that six months after we really started getting into automation, one of the business COE managers called me up and said ‘Wow, where did this come from? I want to put it in the hands of all of my business process experts. For the first time, we can control our own automation.’”

Results

  • 11% to 83% test automation
  • Test cases are created 10-20X faster
  • Test cycles that previously required 5 weeks now take 1 day
  • Risk coverage increased from 32% to 89%
  • Discovered ~20K defects in 3 years ($140M cost avoidance)
  • Reduced testing costs 75%
  • Reduced headcount from 215 to 140
  • Test data is managed centrally and shared across tests
  • High reuse through methodical test case design simplifies updates/extensions
  • Distributed test execution drastically reduces execution time
  • 100% “lights out” regression testing—no manual intervention required

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