SAP R3 applications are often mission critical to many businesses and since your SAP system has been specifically configured to your business processes, your testing plan should confirm that applications can achieve the set business objectives and that the underlying hardware and infrastructure is capable of supporting the required load and transactional volumes.
SAP General Performance benchmarks and SAP Testing have been around since 1993, and the purpose of these benchmarks is essentially to flex the application performance and underlying infrastructure that SAP runs on.
However most generic benchmarks are of little value to many SAP end customers to establish general performance of their implementation. Actual implementation seriously isn’t run in most suitable benchmark environment, SAP architecture and modules are distinct, configuration, coding, implementation, hardware, DB etc. are all distinct and the customer installation is often highly customized for your corporation and natural environment.
One widely used tool for SAP Testing and SAP Performance testing is the IBM® Rational® Performance Tester Extension for SAP Solutions – this tool allows you to test the performance of SAP R/3 applications. There are some open source performance testing tools that can be used for SAP Testing but often given the complexity of SAP most organisations tend to use commercial performance test tools.
- Test creation. You create your test by recording a session with the SAP GUI client. Typically, the recorded session starts when you log on to the SAP R/3 server. You then interact with the application in order to produce a relevant performance test, and the session ends when you log out. The recorded session is split into transactions and SAP screens. Response time measurements and verification points are automatically added to transactions and SAP screens.
- Test editing. After recording, you can edit the events in each transaction and SAP screen. With the SAP Protocol Data view, you can use snapshots of the SAP screen to edit the events. You can replace recorded test values with variable test data, or add dynamic data to SAP tests. You can also set verification points on field values or window titles to validate that the test behaved as expected.
- Test validation. Before deploying the test, you can run the test manually as a single virtual user to make sure that the test runs smoothly and produces the expected results in a nominal environment with minimal server load. You can experience multiple test editing and validation cycles before your test is robust.
- Workload emulation with schedules. When the test runs repeatedly as anticipated, you specify an execution schedule and user groups to emulate a workload that is generated by a large number virtual users. You can add SAP batch input tests to the schedule to simulate a heavy load on the servers while minimizing virtual tester resources.
- Schedule execution. You run the schedule, deploying test execution over virtual users that can be hosted on remote hosts. Each virtual user runs an instance of the SAP GUI client. Response time results are provided by the SAP R/3 server and recorded. Verification points are checked and results are recorded.
- Evaluation of results. You evaluate the results produced by the SAP performance tests through the various reports that are generated during execution. You can also design custom reports.
