Are you still using spreadsheets for SAP Testing?

Technology, and specifically SAP, has moved on leaps and bounds over the last few decades, yet it still surprises us how many customer support and project teams rely on fairly basic spreadsheets or word documents to document and record their system test activities. Surely there must be a better way, without having to spend thousands on a licensed tool?…afterall, in simplistic terms, all you want to do is plan and record the results of a manual testing activity! Well, yes, finally there is; let us introduce SAP’s Test Step Designer!

Test Step Designer is SAP’s modern replacement for the old fashioned spreadsheet style Test Cases. The Test Step Designer (“TSD”) is a free tool within Solution Manager that allows you to easily and quickly create your test cases, but with the added benefit of additional functionality such as:

• Enforcing a test step sequence
• Making Test Result mandatory
• Creating Testing ‘Runs’
• Creating Defects per Test Step
• Testing transparency

Which phase of testing can the TSD be used for? Everything! Functional, Unit, User Acceptance, it doesn’t matter… You can create Test Cases based on your process structure in Solution Documentation, but you can also create a TSD Test Case from scratch or convert a pre-existing excel sheet with test details on, this can be done via the excel sheet template you can download from the TSD dashboard.  In our experience, the TSD really comes into its own when being used for end-to-end process testing, specifically due to the ease in which you can use the system to automatically generate the test script for you – this is a real time saver for hard pressed testing teams.

With the Test Step Designer, manual testing is simplified and accelerated. At the same time, you have the chance to increase your overall test documentation quality. Many features like guided test execution or in-depth reporting capabilities enable a testing experience that was not possible before in SAP Solution Manager and is vastly superior to your old spreadsheet based alternatives.

In closing, make your testing team smile again; ditch the spreadsheets and word documents, create your test script once and reuse often, auto-generate your scripts wherever possible and enjoy the new UX.

If you’d like a no-obligation demonstration of the Test Step Designer feel free to get in touch here.