Business Process Change Analyzer in SAP Solution Manager 7.1

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Business Process Change

Analyzer in SAP Solution Manager

7.1

Applies to:

SAP Solution Manager 7.1 SP5

Summary

Business Process change Analyzer is an application within SAP Solution Manager which helps customers in performing a technical impact analysis of software changes coming into their SAP landscapes. This application has been significantly enhanced in SAP Solution Manager 7.1. In this article you will understand the enhancements to Business Process Change Analyzer in SAP Solution Manager 7.1 and learn what has changed in the areas of analyzing the impact of large changes like SAP Support Packages.

Author: Rajeev Gollapudi

Company: SAP Labs India Created on: 11 July 2012

Author Bio

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Business Process Change Analyzer in SAP Solution Manager 7.1

Change Impact Analysis with SAP Solution Manager

SAP Solution Manager 7.0 EhP1 (or SP18) introduced a new way to do a technical change impact analysis of software changes in SAP systems. This application is called “Business Process Change Analyzer (BPCA)” and it identifies the business processes/process steps impacted by software changes. Once the business process impact is known, customers can assess the risk taken when implementing these changes and also the impacted business processes will form the regression test scope for these software changes. To be able to use this application there are two pre-requisites to be met

1. Business process structures: Customers should document their business process hierarchy in SAP Solution Manager project/solution

2. Technical Bill of Materials (TBOM): Customers should run through the business process transactions so that BPCA can collect the SAP technical objects used during the execution of the business process. This collection of technical objects is called technical bill of materials or TBOMs For example, to create a TBOM for the business process step “Create Sales Order” which is executed using the transaction “VA01” in the ERP system, the user has to go to SAP Solution Manager and run the business process transaction (in this case VA01) – by giving the required input parameters and completing the

creation of sales order. BPCA will enable a trace on the ERP system and collects all the SAP objects used during this execution. This list becomes the TBOM for the process step “Create Sales Order”. Below is a screenshot of the TBOM created for one such execution of the transaction VA01,

In the above example, the TBOM for VA01 transaction has a total of 8315 objects. Observe that different kinds of objects have been collected, like we see there are 6253 program or code objects, 132 user

interfaces, 469 table content and so on. These numbers will differ for different customer situations and also different execution variants of the same transaction code.

Once these two pre-requisites are met, BPCA can then be used to analyze any SAP related software changes. The following 4 use cases are covered by BPCA.

1. Analysis of customizing changes or IMG changes

2. Analysis of custom code or ABAP workbench related changes

3. Analysis of SAP Enhancement package business functions (analyze a business function even before activating it)

4. Analysis of SAP Support Package upgrades or EhP technical upgrades

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In the above example, a particular software change has an impact on the business processes such as “Pre-Sales Processing”, ““Pre-Sales Order Processing for Prospect” and Credit Management”. It also shows the process steps and their corresponding business transactions which are impacted. For example, it shows that the process step “Create Inquiry” which is executed using the transaction “VA11” is impacted by this software change.

Based on these analysis results the user can easily see the risk being taken by implementing this software change. BPCA also has the capability to create a Test Plan based on these results, where all test cases assigned to each of the impacted process steps are compiled into a regression test plan

SAP Solution Manager 7.1 Improvements

SAP Solution Manager 7.1 is a significant release of the ALM platform from SAP. It is primarily enhanced in 3 dimensions - Technology, Integration and UI. BPCA itself was significantly enhanced to address various pain points. Customers who have used Business Process Change Analyzer in SAP solution Manager 7.0 EhP1 have identified the following areas of improvement

 TBOM creation was time consuming and the only way to create a TBOM was to execute the process from the Business Blueprint application (Transaction:SOLAR01) in SAP Solution Manager

 When large changes like SAP Support Packages were analyzed, BPCA was showing most of the business processes as impacted. Customers felt there should be a way to optimize the results of BPCA

 When customization changes are done in SAP, the resultant transport requests had changes in table content. Many of these tables are generic tables and thus BPCA was identifying all process steps using the same table.

 As of SAP solution Manager 7.0 EhP1, BPCA worked on only those business processes which were executed using SAPGUI based transactions

 BPCA is not directly integrated with external test management tools

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TBOM creation made easy

With SAP Solution Manager 7.1 BPCA allows the following ways of creating TBOMs

1. Manual TBOM creation – This is the default approach to create TBOMs, where the user can launch the business transaction from SAP Solution Manager Business Blueprint application. While the user executes the business process step, a trace is enabled on the managed system which forms as the basis for compiling a list of technical objects used during the execution. This list would become the TBOM for the executed process step.

2. TBOM creation by testers – Customers who use SAP Solution Manager Test Workbench for managing their manual testing can leverage the effort put in by manual testers in creating TBOMs. In this approach a tester would start the execution of a test case from the test workbench and while the tester is testing the business process step, the trace is enabled and a TBOM is compiled.

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4. TBOM creation using automated test scripts - The most efficient way of creating TBOMs would be to reuse the automated test scripts to create TBOMs. In this approach a set of automated test scripts which are assigned to business processes are executed and TBOMs are created for the corresponding process steps automatically. This is possible if the customer is using either SAP TAO 2.0 SP04 based test scripts or if the customer is using the new Test Automation Framework in SAP Solution Manager 7.1.

Enhancements to TBOM content

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TBOM for CRM - Create Sales Order Web Application

Another area which was of concern with BPCA, was the precision of the analysis when we analyze

customizing changes which are typically changes to generic customizing table where all process steps using the same generic customizing table were marked as impacted. In SAP Solution Manager 7.1, the TBOMs would not only capture what tables are used, but also the key combinations used to access these tables. With SP05 of SAP Solution Manager 7.1, BPCA also supports the recording of TBOMs for business transactions which spawn off background jobs. This means that if a job is triggered during a business process, then the objects used during the execution of the job (which might occur at a later point of time) will also be captured in the TBOM.

Test Scope Optimization

When large changes like SAP Support Packages or SAP Enhancement Packages are analyzed using BPCA, many business processes are shown as impacted. Technically, this analysis is accurate as there are

thousands of objects modified in these deployments and any of these modified objects might be used by almost all of the customer’ business processes.

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BPCA allows users to optimize and reduce the test scope using the following criteria

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2. Test Efforts: The second optimization criterion is to use the test effort to optimize the test scope. If a particular process step has an automated test available, then it might be efficient to include that step into the test scope and easily test the impacted objects. Also, if the test manager wishes to find out what’s the best set of tests to execute with a finite amount of manual/automated test capacity. For example, if the test manager sees an available capacity of 10 Man days of manual testers, then the user can use BPCA to see what would be the best set of processes to test manually using just 10 man days of effort.

3. Test and Business Process Attributes: While optimizing the test scope, BPCA will leave out certain process steps out of the test scope. Users are able to influence this decision, by enforcing BPCA to include “certain” tests to always be included or excluded from the test scope. Users will be able to select these tests by using either business process attributes or test attribute values. For example, a test manager might want to say that if there are any critical/high priority business processes impacted, then they will always be included in the test scope. So the user will use a custom process attribute called “Business Process Priority” and influences BPCA to consider this as part of the optimization. This allows users to also minimize/protect the risk they will take by

optimizing the tests for a given change.

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Integration with Test Management Tools

Once user performance an impact analysis and optimizes the test scope using BPCA, the immediate next step is to take this test scope and create a test plan so that the impacted processes can be tested before moving the changes to production. In the past, BPCA was able to automatically create test plans based on the impact analysis only in SAP Solution Manager Test Workbench. Many customers use 3rd party test management tools like IBM Rational Quality Manager or HP Quality Center. In SAP Solution Manager 7.1 SP05, BPCA now has opened new interfaces so that users can create test plans in these 3rd party test management tools and also use the information about the test cases stored in these tools in Test Scope Optimization in BPCA. The following use cases are supported with these new interfaces -

1. Trigger an impact analysis from a 3rd party tool: It would now be possible to launch the BPCA application from a 3rd party test management tool and even pre-fill certain input parameters.

2. Test Plan Creation: It would be possible for users in BPCA to be able to create a test plan based on the impacted business processes identified by BPCA. A user would run an impact analysis

(optionally do test scope optimization) and then will be able to create a test plan automatically in the 3rd party test management tool. If a test plan was already created, the user would be able to extend an existing test plan as well.

3. Test Scope Optimization: To perform a test scope optimization, BPCA needs to understand the details of what kind of test cases are available for the impacted business processes. If the test cases are stored in a 3rd party test management tool, then BPCA will now able to read the information about the test cases (what kind of tests are available for the impacted processes? Are they automated? What was the effort required to execute these tests? etc.). Based on this information BPCA will be able to identify an optimized test scope which consists of tests stored in a 3rd party test management tool.

Integration with Change Request Management

With SAP Solution Manager 7.1 SP05, it is now possible to trigger a BPCA analysis directly from a change document or a change request which is in the status “In-Development”. Below screenshot shows the new change document CRM UI where there is a new action to “Create a BPCA Analysis”.

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The above UI is also the new redesigned BPCA analysis screen which makes it simple for the end user to run a change impact analysis in a simple 5 step approach

1. Select what you to analyze 2. Select the type of change

3. Search and Enter the details of the change (ex: Change Document number) 4. Specify the project which holds the business blueprint and TBOM

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Conclusion and Call for Action

There are significant improvements to the functionality of Business Process Change Analyzer in SAP

Solution Manager 7.1(especially with the latest support package SP05). Customers across the world are now thinking on how they can go about implementing this application. The most common approach we have observed in many customers is a way to do a proof-of-concept (POC) project to see the value of BPCA and also understand the cost and complexity in the implementation of the same. A typical project would have the following activities from my experience working on different projects

1. Select a business scenario for scope of the POC project. Make sure the number of process steps/transactions in this scope is high enough that you can try the test scope optimization

functionality to really see the reduction in test scope using BPCA. Many customers do not have an up to date or accurate documentation of business process structures. There are capabilities in SAP Solution Manager 7.1 like Reverse Business Process Documentation and excel import which can help you in building a process structure in SAP Solution Manager.

2. Create TBOMs for the selected business scenario. Try out all 4 alternatives of creating TBOMs – create manually, creation by testers, creation by business experts, and creation of TBOMs using automated test scripts. This will allow you to understand the alternatives and also helps in planning what’s the best way forward for your organization.

3. Find a change event to analyze. Typically customers would either pick a change which caused some trouble in the past. Example – a transport request which moved to production and caused an unexpected process step to fail. We also recommend customers to select a good example for an EHP deployment or a support package stack deployment where they can see the real benefit of test scope optimization using BPCA. Make sure you also try out different types of changes like custom developed transports, IMG changes and business functions in EHPs

4. Interpret the results. You need to then analyze the results of your change impact analysis of different changes. Calculate the benefit/value that BPCA can bring in giving you the transparency in change impact and more importantly the reduction in test scope for the changes you have analyzed. Also calculate the effort and resources required in the preparation of BPCA to answer questions like – Where do we get the source of our business process structure? What is the best approach to create TBOMs? What kind of resources/people do I need from the IT organization in setting up BPCA? Etc.

5. Create a roadmap for implementation of BPCA. Based on the POC results create a plan to

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Business Process Change Analyzer in SAP Solution Manager 7.1