Integrating Automatic VC and IPC Testing into Your Current Processes

David is CTO, Principal Consultant, and Co-Owner of eSpline LLC.  He has worked within SAP development teams on the IPC product configurator and pricing engines, contributed to multiple IPC and VC customer projects (IPC, CRM, SD, MM, PP, PS) over the past fourteen years as product modeler, data migration specialist, technical architect, and project manager. At eSpline he has an additional mission: to help raise the bar, through innovative products and services, on how SAP product configuration and pricing projects and maintenance processes are done.

Christophe is a Senior Technical Consultant, (SD,CRM, Variant Configuration). He has been involved in many projects with direct relation with SAP (VC/IPC/CRM) technical teams for standard or customer development projects (PSA, Schneider Electric,...). He was involved in building a dedicated rule interpreter (custom configurator based in IPC) developed for the SAP strategic development in SAP headquarters (Walldorf / Germany). Christophe's long experience working in SAP headquarters (2.5 years) makes him our main contact with the SAP CRM/IPC development teams. Christophe is our technical guru, responsible for new technologies evaluation. 

When it comes to testing that new or changed product models meet their specifications, most SAP customers using product configuration are still in the Dark Ages:  common practice is manual unit testing by the modeler or a colleague, followed by manual spot checking in production, and feedback from users.

• This may have worked well enough in better economic times, especially if your users were internal or partners - but not end customers configuring on the web, or if you were not required to measure the impact of defects on the business, or when you had sufficient resources to fix the defects on demand.  But now you have a need to "do more with less effort and higher quality".

• Automated testing of your sales and production configurators is one of the  lower-hanging answers to these needs.  By building a library of test cases that describe valid and invalid product configurations, you can evolve your testing processes into the modern era, enabling benefits like:  write once, run many times, eg. in your development, QA, and productive systems, to catch defects as early in the model lifecycle as possible;  mass testing to wildly increase coverage beyond what spot checks could ever accomplish;  frequent and timely regression testing  to mitigate the risk that changes to product models introduce new defects, and to speed new product introduction.

• Achieving these benefits does not require starting a large project to accomplish revolutionary change.  By considering where testing is most needed, usually new, changing, or troubled product models, you can start small, quickly demonstrate the value of automated testing, and then incrementally expand.

• In this presentation, we will give you a quick motivation and introduction to automated testing of SAP product configuration, then using a commercially-available tool will show a technique to detect changes to product models by any modeler, build test cases for the changes, use a view of the model to inspect the changes, ensure they have test cases, run the test cases, and see the results on the model view.