BPCA was designed by SAP to support its customers to perform change impact analyses and identify potential impacts on critical business processes. It can optimize the test scope for regression tests, and semi-automatically generate risk-based Test Plans.

To benefit from BPCA capabilities, entities known as Technical Bill of Material (aka TBOM) must be created either manually (dynamic TBOMs) or automatically based on UPL or SCMON data (semi-dynamic TBOMs).

Long Story

BPCA stands for Business Process Change Analyzer, and it was designed by SAP to support its customers to perform change impact analyses and identify potential impacts on critical business processes. It is available as of SAP Solution Manager 7.0 EhP1 (SP18), and has evolved through the years to provide additional features, graphics and recommendations.

Software changes may be driven either by business (e.g. corporate strategy), legal (e.g. IFRS) or technical (e.g. upgrades) requirements. Change events can be classified in two categories – SAP-triggered (e.g. deployment of new EhPs) and customer-triggered (e.g. custom developments) – and regardless their nature, business processes may be affected leading to an unstable environment, causing business losses and lower profits. 

To minimize the impacts, IT departments must perform the so-called Regression Tests. Its purpose is to identify potential impacts on critical business processes before planned change events are deployed on productive (BAU) systems. In a global economy, companies are led by efficiency and effectiveness, thus innovation must be deployed as quick as possible at minimum costs. Due to the lack of time and resources, the quality of tests may be impaired, and software bugs may be found during Operations.

The Business Process Change Analyzer can optimize the test scope for regression tests, and semi-automatically generate risk-based Test Plans. The Test Scope Optimization (TSO) is a feature of BPCA, and it was designed to support complex changes such as deployments of Enhancement Packages or Major Release Projects where a huge amount of business processes is affected.

BPCA on SAP Solution Manager 7.2 can analyse the following software change events:

  • Support Packages and Support Package Stacks

  • Enhancement Packages

  • Planned Business Function Activation

  • Transport Requests

Including:

  • Object List

  • Change Transaction

Object List: this option can be chosen to find out which business processes may be affected by changes on a specific (or a list of) technical object such as Function Modules, Classes, Tables, among others.

Change Transaction: organizations running Change Request Management (aka ChaRM) to manage software changes may choose this option to select either a Request for Change (RfC) or a Change Document (CD) instead of manually selecting related Transport Requests included on these CRM transaction types.

When defining test scopes for Regression Tests, Test Managers can decide the best approach among 3 options:

  • Include all business processes in a Solution/Branch/View

  • Include all affected critical business processes (without TSO)

  • Include only most critical business processes based on an optimization criteria*

* The optimization ranking (X) is calculated as follows:

X = Test Coverage / Test Effort

This means BPCA prioritizes nodes with greater Test Coverage and lower Test Effort. For instance, if the process step “Create Sales Order” has 100 objects affected and “Create Quotation” has 60, the former is more critical considering both have the same test effort. Now, let’s suppose it takes 20 minutes to manually create a sales order and 1 minute to create a quotation by running an automated test case, the latter will be classified as more critical. The concept behind TSO is restricting the test of impacted objects to only once, whenever possible.

To benefit from BPCA capabilities, entities known as Technical Bill of Material (aka TBOM) must be created either manually (dynamic TBOMs) or automatically based on UPL or SCMON data (semi-dynamic TBOMs). A third-option is possible, but it is not recommended by SAP (static TBOMs). As a rule of thumb, each executable entity (e.g. transaction, report, …) should have at least one TBOM assigned to it, but a better approach is to consider its “variants”/execution contexts, thus several TBOMs may exist for a specific entity.

(i) TBOM types and creation will be described in another blog.

(ii) Likewise, EhP/SP Scope and Effort Analyzer (SEA) can consume TBOMs to perform its analyses, and it will be described in another blog.

The figure below shows a sample of all impacted nodes as well as their respective executable entities.

The graphic below provides the following information:

  • The total effort to test all nodes in the chosen Solution/Branch/View is over 5.740 hours

  • The total effort to test only and all affected nodes is reduced to 356 hours

  • The total effort with TSO is reduced to 20 hours

  • The total effort with TSO is distributed as follows:

    • 2 hours on existing automated test cases

    • 10 hours on existing manual test cases

    • 8 hours on executable entities (missing test cases)

  • The number of test cases with TSO is distributed as follows:

    • 8 automated test cases

    • 5 manual test cases

    • 4 missing test cases

The figure below shows the number of business scenarios, business processes, process steps and executable entities to be tested in each approach:

  • 2876 executable entities would have to be tested considering the complete Process Documentation

  • 189 executable entities would have to be tested considering the test scope without TSO

  • 21 executable entities would have to be tested considering the test scope with TSO and test coverage of 99.18%

The table view provides more details:

The graphic below shows affected business processes organized in groups of 4 elements, and recommended test scope (green shadow area).

This is the same graphic, but the granularity is set to 1.

TSO allows Test Managers to semi-automatically generate risk-based Test Plans. As some affected business processes are left out from optimized test scope for the sake of lower test effort, companies are running the risk of finding errors after the deployment on BAU systems. Hence, SAP recommends its customers to always include critical business processes in test scopes recommended by TSO. Manually added business processes (e.g. critical BPs) can be found on the left side of the vertical black line.

Furthermore, in the Test Case Recommendations Overview, TSO provides recommendations to reduce the Test Execution Effort.

  • Creation of missing tests

  • Replacement of existing manual with automated tests

The integration between a Partner Test Suite (e.g. HPE ALM) and BPCA will be described in another blog article.