#erp testing methodology

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.

The challenges of rising competition and changing technology are forcing companies to optimize their resources. By doing so, they are aiming to improve productivity, reduce operational cost, increase profitability and achieve customer satisfaction. The implementation of an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution helps in meeting the above mentioned objectives.

What is an ERP?

A business enterprise has many departments, functions and processes where more often than not they work in silos or worse, at cross purposes to each other. This leads to redundancies, loss of efficiency, productivity and waste of precious resources. In an increasingly competitive world with demanding customers, this can mean a deficiency in service and reduced profitability. This calls for the implementation of an ERP solution.

ERP is a suite of integrated software applications that helps to get real time information from various departments, functions and processes of the business. This information can be analysed to help optimize the functions and resources of the business. The software helps the stakeholders to take suitable timebound decisions to achieve business objectives.

The ERP software helps in collecting, storing, managing and interpreting data by using a common database management system. The ERP software takes into account all the hierarchical structures and workflows of each business unit or function and provides a common platform or interface. To prevent the implementation of an ERP solution from failing, suitable ERP QA should be carried out. The ERP testing methodology should ensure the various domain specific functionalities of the ERP software work seamlessly.

Types of ERP testing

Installation testing: A faulty installation of the software can lead to its failure. It can happen when the functions or their sub routines do not work in synchrony or there are some missing files. An ERP testing can identify the glitches and help in the proper installation of the software.

Functional testing: The ERP testing services test and validate the software suite’s ability to meet the operational objectives.

Load testing: Here, the ERP testing services find out if the software is capable of processing data beyond the prescribed limit. This is an important information to know from the perspective of scaling up the functioning of the software, if needed.

Security testing: The growing cyber security threat from viruses, malware, ransomware, trojans etc means organisations have to safeguard their IT resources. Thus, security testing of an ERP software becomes important by validating aspects like user authentication, passwords etc.

Checklist for ERP testing

The testing team should prepare a comprehensive checklist to identify the test areas. Each of the above mentioned tests should have well documented guidelines.

Assess the requirements: Assess the project requirements, identify the objectives and delineate the modules to be tested. Find out the various touch points of the business with an aim to enhance the test coverage area and to improve the test quality.

Set the test goal: The type, scope and objective of the test are to be identified. This also leads to the identification of resources and the team structure to implement the specific test. Find out the departments, functions and processes to be integrated with the ERP software in order to test them.

Identify the test cases/areas: Identify the test cases and areas that are to be managed manually or through test automation. The test cases should validate all the processes that fall within the test coverage area.

Set up the test tools effectively: State the quality metrics based on which the testing has to be validated. Ensure that the systems to be used for testing are working to their optimum capacity. This precludes any performance issues during the testing phase.

Simple testing: Begin the testing phase with a simple test, namely, creating a customer account or processing a customer payment. Record each and every step of the test process for training and for conducting the retest. The ERP testing methodology should adopt the best practices to optimize productivity and improve efficiency.

Complex testing: Conduct a slew of tests as a part of the overall ERP testing exercise such as usability, performance, integration and security.

Create a recording mechanism: Prepare a reporting mechanism to collect the test reports for further analysis. As the test generates various reports related to its success or failure, they should be properly documented to identify the vulnerabilities (areas of failure) and process defects.

Conclusion

Maintaining a checklist helps to seamlessly execute a suitable ERP testing methodology. The validation of an ERP software helps in its proper implementation. This helps organizations to streamline operations and optimize resources for better functioning and performance. Efficiency and cost-effectiveness can be assured when teams maintain a checklist.