First time right – one step closer with ATC

Pieter Breunesse, 12 December 2012

This year I was lucky enough to attend SAP TechEd 2012 in Madrid. As I was building my agenda I read about the new ABAP Test Cockpit (ATC) and was curious what this ATC is all about.

As a developer SAP offers me different ways to check custom code. Of course the first step would be that the code has no syntax errors, but besides that you can use the Extended Program Check and the Code Inspector to help you find errors or code improvements. So what new functionalities will this ATC bring to us?

Developer perspective

The feature I liked the most during the 4 hours workshop was the tight integration in transaction SE80. Where you can easily run static code checks on ABAP code to find functional, usability, performance and security-bugs. To do an ATC check for example in SE80 select the program, function-module, class or package and right-click and choose for the ABAP Test Cockpit.

The result can be seen within transaction SE80, where you can easily navigate to the code and back to fix the issues and re-check the fixed issues.

The success factor for tools like the Extended Syntax check, Code Inspector, Unit tests and also the ABAP Test Cockpit is the acceptance by the developers. If the developers don’t use the tools, well then the result will all be the same. But I think that with the integration and the easy to use navigation, all in one transaction, will lead to more usage of this framework provided by SAP.

Quality Expert perspective

But the ATC is not just a check tool with a new look and feel. It is more then that, and will give quality experts a robust tool to assure a certain level of quality in custom code.

In the consolidation system quality experts can schedule mass regression runs for checking code and distribute the results back to the development system.

With transaction ATC the quality manager can configure and schedule all checks in the quality system. By means of a RFC the quality manager has the option to replicate the findings back to the development system. The findings can also be sent to the developers by email.

The developer can then go to the development system and see the findings from the quality system in SE80 in the ATC result browser.

Another feature is the exemption process, based on the four-eye principle. In this case a finding is reported to the developer from the quality system. The developer can then request an exemption and send it to the quality manager.

The manager can then decide to approve or reject the requested exemption. On approval the finding is not displayed anymore in the result list when the next check run is processed.