Global Dairy Co-operative

About Global Dairy Co-operative

The co-operative employs over 20,000 people globally, is active in 140 countries.

To build a strong process around SAP testing, the organization introduced Micro Focus ALM to improve efficiency in developing, testing, and maintaining applications, as well as gain real-time visibility. Soon, the automated testing model was adopted for the majority of applications. More recently, the ALM implementation moved from an on-premises to a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. The Test Lead explains the reasons: “We have many external development partners who will do the core application development, and then hand-over to us to take it through the User Acceptance Testing (UAT) phase and into production. We wanted a way to put their test evidence into our central repository, as a baseline for future audits and regression testing. The ALM SaaS model made this possible without compromising the security of our own network.”

The organization used SAP Test Acceleration and Optimization (TAO) to create end-to-end test scenarios which were then managed and executed through ALM. When SAP announced the end-of-life for TAO, the team investigated alternatives. The SAP environment is sophisticated with several HANA instances, and Fiori in use. With over 250 SAP test scenarios in place, the new test automation solution would need to align in skill set with SAP TAO test scripts. Micro Focus UFT One provided the answer to achieve test execution at full velocity. GUI testing is a big part of the testing effort, and UFT One has proved helpful in testing a variety of GUIs, including SAPGUI.

Within ALM the organization has created a baseline domain which holds all SAP tests, all project tests, and all core tests from applications other than SAP. This ensures full visibility in the management of all test cases. Every week a full test run is executed against the preproduction SAP environment to check if any of the changes made during the weekly release have an adverse effect on existing functionality. Executed across 6 different devices, all 170 tests are completed in just three hours.

The combination of ALM and UFT One increases test efficiency with clear test processes and cases which is proving helpful in audits. The Test Lead comments on the daily use of the solutions: “Depending on the origin, either a business analyst or a test manager will create and execute a test from ALM. For this reason, usability was key to us. ALM is very easy to use and the feedback from business users and test managers alike confirms this. Moving from TAO to UFT One is easy too. We now have 170 UFT One end-to-end business process-driven automated tests, and we notice that test conversions are becoming much quicker as the test repository grows.”

Test reusability is proving a key differentiator for the organization, as highlighted by the Test Lead: “We often can just copy tests, or very easily make minor changes, and it has reduced the testing time significantly. When we first introduced ALM, the automated testing process realized a saving of $800,000 over five years, through 9,000 saved man hours.”