Technology Blogs by Members
Explore a vibrant mix of technical expertise, industry insights, and tech buzz in member blogs covering SAP products, technology, and events. Get in the mix!
cancel
Turn on suggestions
Auto-suggest helps you quickly narrow down your search results by suggesting possible matches as you type.
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Optimizing your SAP Upgrade with Scope and Effort Analyzer Implementation

Former Member
‎02-17-2015 6:38 PM

Overview

SEA analyzes an SAP environment and documents the impact of an upgrade to an Enhancement Pack or Support Stack before the project begins in an effort to understand the costs and tests associated with the project. It is delivered with Solution Manager 7.1 (SolMan) and available since Support Stack 11.

Minimal configuration in SolMan is required to use the SEA functionality. A target environment will need to be configured and the system information included in LMDB.

Usage and Procedure Logging (UPL) is not required, but is recommended to be implemented in Solution Manager to obtain more accurate data. UPL is available on any ABAP based system and is based on the core functionality of the SAP Coverage Analyzer. Compared with Workload and Performance Statistics (ST03N), the UPL result will be more accurate. It is able to detect all online and background processes and submitted jobs. It can detect the usage of any ABAP process down to the most basic levels and will provide information about system modifications, user exits, development classes as well as single method executions. The Workload and Performance Statistics (ST03N) only counts the dialog steps during the running process but not the number of times it has been run, where as UPL can count the number of executed ABAP procedures on a daily base.

Results Summary

The Summary provides a wealth of information regarding the Upgrade Project including the target platform and version, the total number of days estimated for testing, the number of custom code objects that require adjustment, the number of modifications that require adjustment and the estimated amount of time to complete the development efforts on the custom code and the modifications.

In addition this Summary will provide you with a quick and clear understanding of what will be the overall effort of the upgrade project.  All of the information displayed is detailed in the other parts of the SEA report.

Standard and custom code impacts analysis

SEA provides a list of impacted modifications (SPAU and SPDD) as well a list of custom developments that will need to be modified as part of the upgrade project. Also, the toolset provides an estimation of time required to complete the development efforts needed to complete the project.

The list of impacted custom developments provides an indication of the issue with each object that’s needs to be modified. Also, the list can be exported to Microsoft Excel and used as work list.

The impacted SPAU/SPDD objects are displayed by their affected SAP Application Component and the impacted custom objects by Packages. For planning purposes this information is very valuable to understand the required resources for the upgrade. Prior to the introduction of SEA this information was only made available after completing a test upgrade.

Test Management

During the analysis creation SolMan can be used as the primary Test Management Application or integrated with a 3rd Party Test Management Application such as HP Quality Center. The recommend rule for SEA is that it can provide recommendations for creation of automated test cases.

SEA test scope optimization is based on the BPCA (Business Process Change Analyzer) feature of Solution Manager. Based on UPL, the tool is much faster to use and the analysis more precise.

The objective of SEA and BPCA is to assist the system in the performance of a battery of tests as efficiently as possible:

  • Only the business processes impacted are tested
  • The order of the test is determined by the number of objects impacted by each test. Those with a higher number of objects will have a higher priority. 
  • Automated tests are prioritized over manual tests, as they require very little effort to run

The test order is determined by the type of test conducted (manual or automated) and is influenced by the number of impacted objects tested. When executing the first four tests the test coverage  quickly increases to 60% (of the objects impacted by the upgrade).

In this portion of the SEA Results, the workload available can be modified during the testing phase. SEA provides the ability to quickly analyze the risks taken (% of the tests covered, business processes not tested). SEA is a very efficient tool to safeguard an SAP upgrade project by providing the impacts prior to execution  while optimizing the testing costs.

When using the Test Workbench in Solution Manager, the results of the test optimization can be exported as Test packages.

By reducing the granularity in the graph the provided the associated steps are listed and greater detail is provided on each step of the testing.

The detailed list of tests is prioritized by number of objects impacted.

Conclusion

SEA provides new functionality, which modifies the way IT organizations will plan upgrades. With it, there is a planning tool to precisely evaluate the upgrade budget and schedule, in order to decide if and when the project can be done.

The customer benefits of using SEA cover three main areas in terms of time and resources. The ability to understand the impact of an impending upgrade prior to having to do the upgrade, understanding the custom code and modifications that will need to be corrected, also Test Scope Optimization will focus on providing the proper resources to the specific areas where testing will be critical.

More information about the setup, installation and configuration of SEA can found at: http://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/display/SM/SAP+Solution+Manager+WIKI+-+Test+Management

Labels in this area
Popular Blog Posts