SAP R/3 Testing: Using the Computer Aided Test Tool (CATT) (Paperback)

It's a definite book to be included in any SAP library.

The R/3 CATT tool is one of those golden gems that isn't given much notice, but is quite easy to use, surprisingly comprehensive, provides a wealth of robust features, and provides tremendous value-added potential to projects large and small. We'd looked at CATT way back with 3.0d and recoiled in horror -- it was simply brutal. Somewhere along the road SAP turned that ugly frog into a prince (and hardly told a soul in the process!). Committed to a 4.6b functional upgrade the first quarter of 2000 (we were one of, if not THE, first to take shipment of the software) we found our previous 3rd party test tool unsupported and, best case, at least one quarter behind shipping. Forced to take another look at CATT as the only product on the market "guaranteed" to work with 4.6b we were surprised and delighted at what we found. We printed everything off the system on-line help we could find, pieced together a workbook, found an SAP America CATT resource for guideance, and went off to our functional teams to "sell" CATT. This book was exactly what we were looking for.

The book offers overviews of testing as a whole, some development methodology/ASAP material that you can gloss over, and then provides procedural examples of simple test modules and test procedures that you can record/build on your own system. You can quickly move to record and build test modules for functionality within your own development scope. With this under your belt you can then begin to explore the robust features of the CATT Expert mode. Yet, even at this fairly simple low-level testing perspective, you've got a lot of R/3 testing power in hand.

A comprehensive test plan can be composed of these building blocks, test modules for each transaction within the business string, assembled into test procedures. The few limitations for CATT (transactions that behave differently in background vs. foreground, transactions that LEAVE TO TRANSACTION, screen-dependent selections (menu's, drill-down's, etc.)) can easily be isolated from the CATT-driven test plan and manually tested in a supplemental test plan.

The fruits of CATT test catalogues extend long after successful implementation 'go live'. Phased implementations benefit from having a regression test tool readily available to insure there are no unpredicted impacts within the existing production base functionality. Hot pack acceptance, and kernal upgrades are readily testable and even full-blown functional upgrades SHOULD be possible with minimal disruption to the test scripts EXCEPT where changes have occurred -- and the failure of your existing CATT scripts would point those areas out!

There's still a healthy market out there for third-party R/3 test tools, and of course CATT doesn't do everything. But for a "free tool" there's a lot of value out there to harness. This book is a solid step in that process.