What Do Your Process and Testing Integration Stakeholders Need from SAP Change Control?

[Former Member]

At Revelation Software Concepts (RSC), our open integration approach works extremely well with today’s mixed best-of-breed ALM tools. In particular, mixed tool sets are driving increased interest in component integrations as a way to maintain a “single source of truth” across all systems, leveraging existing processes and software investments.

Lately, another driver has added to the growing interest in integration. Enterprise IT organizations are embracing a DevOps approach as a better, faster way to deliver business value in the form of working software.

Integrating components has some interesting implications for SAP Change Control technology specialists like RSC. In particular, organizations expect their change control solutions to enforce governance. This makes sense, since you probably already rely on your change control software to ensure that changes always match their associated records. If they don’t, everything from testing and troubleshooting through to audits becomes much more difficult.

So a good change control integration delivers value on many levels. For examples, look at Rev-Trac integrations with SAP’s Business Process Change Analyzer and with HP Quality Center.

BPCA Integration:

We know, and SAP confirms, that support package changes, customer developments and add-on installations all affect business processes in multiple ways. To detect and monitor these effects, SAP’s Business Process Change Analyzer (BPCA) compares objects included in a transport to objects in the target system. You can tell which parts of a Business Process Hierarchy are affected in a given scenario because they’re assigned to specific transactions, business processes or process steps.

Once you configure BPCA for your established SAP processes, when you change an object you have to remember to run the change analyzer to see what objects your development will affect. Otherwise, you might break something in PRD, where breakage gets expensive.

Our BPCA/Rev-Trac integration lets you use Rev-Trac to automatically initiate an ad hoc BPCA event on any transport associated with multiple Rev-Trac requests.

For more on how BPCA works, take a look at this article on the SCN.

HPQC Integration:

The Rev-Trac Quality Center Synchronizer Adapter (RT-QC Sync Adapter) synchronizes HP Quality Center requirements and defects with Rev-Trac requests. Requirements and defects created in HP Quality Center can then be mirrored inside Rev-Trac and vice-versa. With each corresponding pair linked bi-directionally between HPQC and Rev-Trac, any updates or modifications are automatically reflected in both components.

The functional result is a single, ready-made solution that provides efficient change control process automation with enforced testing analysis for all code and configuration changes. Visibility also increases into testing requirements, testing scripts and test outcomes, since they are all documented within the associated Rev-Trac change requests. These integrations reduce manual work, ensure change entities are linked properly and let you know in advance the effects of changes. Auditability and visibility into testing both improve - you know a defect was tested because Rev-Trac enforces the necessary processes.

The bottom line? You can correct defects earlier. That’s important because problems get expensive after they reach production. Research shows that in normal SAP landscapes, over 50 percent of errors are found in QAS and PRD, not in DEV. That’s a good deal of error leakage.

Errors cost seven times more to correct in QAS and 14 times more to fix in PRD.