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The future of SAP Integration PI, CPI and how to prepare your self

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So yesterday, Tuesday, November 13. 2018, I just hosted a webinar about the key takeaways from SAP Teched and how to implement things based on it. It thinks it was one of my own webinars with most viewers (40). So it is an important topic. I think I missed the Gartner quote that 50% of the development budget will be about integration or something in that line.

When we were starting to see some cloud applications I did not see so many integrations. Lately, I have seen quite a number of a project involving some cloud application. I had seen that SAP would be able to provide some of the content as pre-delivered, but there are going to be so much more than you will need to develop. I just got an email from an SAP customer that they got a tsunami of cloud integration, so it is other areas as well.

Understand where you are going

On the webinar, I do cover how you can understand your own integrations and try to plan what integration you should be doing. I recommend that you take a look at the Integration Solution Advisor – Methodology. It has been updated and I have talked with quite a few architects using it and it gave them a good understanding of what they should be doing.

Roadmap

Then I cover the current state of the SAP PI roadmap, which will affect your existing integration. I do see the CPI on your SAP PI system as a good option to run some of your content. You probably want to start a migration if you are on a dual stack system, I have some resources on how you can do an SAP PI migration project. If you have Seeburger and want to migrate to B2B Add-on I created a webinar on how you can automate the migration. I also recorded a podcast on how a customer did a migration of Seeburger to B2B Add-on.

After you have been going thru your ISA-M you will have some integration patterns that you need new tools for. I’m covering SAP Cloud offerings for integration and their full iPaaS product. I think it would be wise to use the SAP tools first to see if they suit your needs and if not then you can find a better vendor for the solution. SAP will be adding new functions to the Cloud Offering to address the customers needs.

Operations

There is a need to make more integration at a faster pace. And you are probably not able to get more people on your team. So it is about making them as effective as possible. At Figaf we have created solutions to enable the development process to be a little easier from development, documentation, testing and supporting. You can check our tool Figaf IRT that can support the full lifecycle. I think it will help you improve your development of new features, so you will be more flexible and develop things faster.

Next week I’m hosting a webinar where I’ll cover how you can use the Figaf IRT tool to optimize your SAP PI and CPI development process.

Signup for webinar on Speeding up integration

 

View the presentation

You can watch the full video here.

 

 

Whitepaper of what Figaf IRT can do for your SAP PI/PO or CPI integrations

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Over the last 6 months, our IRT application has expanded from just being an application that facilitates SAP PI/PO testing to deal with more of the full development process for SAP Integration.  We have added the following capabilities.

  • Filter your SAP PI/PO alerts so you can see new errors and document how old errors can be resolved
  • Enable you to test SAP Cloud Platform Integration(CPI)
  • That you don’t need to install anything at the PI system to use the tool
  • Enable you to track all development objects on SAP PI/PO and CPI so you can see the difference on each one
  • Create Ticket to log which objects you have changed for any specific use cases, so you can document what you have done to solve a ticket.

    Download the Figaf IRT white paper now

    • Test all the ICOs where an object is used like a message mapping

We have had some challenging trying to communicate all of the functions that we are supporting in the process and how it worked. So now I finally was able to create a document that tries to explain all the capabilities we have in an easy to read manner.

We have tried to make it as appealing to the business but also explain what we are doing to make the life easier for integration developers.

You can download it here

Download the whitepaper

If you have any idea on how to improve it, please share.

Get FIGAF IRT and start using it for free here

Download IRT

 

 

 

Why have a full SAP PI/PO regression test case is needed

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Do you have a full set of regression test cases of your SAP PI/PO system and can run them when needed to ensure that nothing is broken.

This week I was talking with a potential customer about our testing tool and the newest feature where they did not need to install anything on the PI system. They did, unfortunately, have a too old version of one of the components to allow us to read the log messages. It was added with OSS 2437778.

It is the standard way out to add new features to patches or service packs to give customers there the features which are required. Most of all the time you want to be able to leverage the new functions in some scenarios to solve a business need.

With the way SAP is delivering the Java code is it cumulative patches. This mean that patch 3 contains updates from patch 2 plus some more changes. So you cannot just get the fix you want as you can with ABAP.

They are also linked with dependencies so if you upgrade one, some part will stop function because it is missing a dependent library. So most of the time you have to update quite a bit of component and you have no idea about how this will affect everything else. You can read the release notes, but it is difficult or close to impossible to predict how this will impact your system.

And to make matters even worse, you probably need to upgrade all components to the latest to ensure all dependencies are met.  

In a normal company it will take a long time to validate these things, so if you’re just adding a simple feature it is really a no go to do this. The business case is difficult to explain, we want this feature to do X, but it will cost a lot of testing. So you have to wait for the business to ask for a new feature and then that project would have to pay for the upgrade/patch.

That’s the reason why I want to have a full set of regression test cases that you can just run whenever there is any patch or an upgrade that you have to ensure that everything works as expected without involving people in the testing of the new features.

The price for an upgrade is a partial basis to get them to upgrade the system and then a part to test the component. The biggest cost is the tests that you need to perform to ensure that everything works as expected. It makes, therefore, sense that to be able to automate that part if it is possible.

With most test tools that take a long time to set up these the test cases and that’s why we’ve created a tool to enable you to set up these test cases fast.  We had a customer Anadarko Petroleum Corporation that could set up 300 test cases in just 3 weeks.

Since then we have optimized the process a lot making it a lot faster to set up test cases. So I would assume you will be able to set up test cases a lot faster than now.

The cost of running the test for the full system is close to zero, so you can run them daily to get information about how the system performs or if anything is broken.

So you can apply the latest support packs if you want to have an updated system with the latest features and fixes.

You can download Figaf IRT tool and use the tool for free upto 10 ICO’s to test on your own SAP PI/PO system. You can request a trial license to get more tests done. If you already have the patch mentioned then you don’t need to install anything on your system and in many cases use your own use for the testing.

 

Support for you SAP PI/PO development process

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I’m pretty thrilled about our latest development of the Figaf IRT tool for SAP Integration.

When I started doing XI 3.0 work I was really frustrated with the way things were documented. It was a really manual process that users needed to follow. The documentation was never updated. Now 14 years later I can see that we got a tool that can help in the cases. We can now help you really document what has changed automatically.

So a month ago I found that we could leverage the tools we had created for the IRT tool to support the full development lifecycle. Today we are releasing the first version of it. It is not perfect and there are some holes but it clearly shows which direction we can do with it. Hopefully, you will also be able to see the benefit of it.

The different steps in the process are the following:

  • Alerts are raised from a PI Message using standard alerting.
    • Create rules for how to handle alerts
  • Perform your development in Repository/NWDS
  • Create a ticket to with a link to the incident
    • Assign the changes to the ticket
    • You can see the differences I the mappings
  • The test is performed to ensure it works
    • Base on the Figaf IRT test tool that allows users to create test case fast based on i.e. production data

I have created a video to show what we are able to do with the tool.

We still have a few things to work with to with making it better and cover more of the development cycle, but it is always better with customer feedback. So if you have any things that would help in your process do let us know.

You can download the tool for free at https://figaf.com/irt

 

 

IRT 2.2 Release notes Testing of SAP PI, Cloud Integration and Changemanagement

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Yesterday we release the IRT 2.2 to make testing even easier. This release contains a lot of new functionality that makes it a lot easier to test your system.

One of our visions is to make an all round change management tool that allow you to find errors, fix them, document the changes, and test it. We have added the first part of this which is to support the change management, this will allow you to document what is going on in the landscape.  So now we have a link form ICO all the way to message mapping. This will allow us to ensure that you test the interfaces before you make any release.

You can see the video for a presentation here.

 

Cloud Integration. We have now added the option to start testing SAP Cloud Integration (CPI aka HCI) . It is made possible by the new option to trace information so we don’t need to make modifications to your iflows to test it. We can do a regression test with the HTTP adapter now, and hopefully will be able to add some more adapters in next release. For other messages, you need to use the baseline testing, where you will be sending the same message again. We will add more functionality to this testing to make it easier to do regression test for all adapters.

Baseline test cases. This is to make integration with Workflow tools like HPE UFT that already creates a set of number of messages to the SAP PI/PO system. So instead of IRT is sending test messages the sending system is creating the messages. The test would then compare that the same messages are sent and compare that they are processed in the same order. This is also a function we are using when testing with SAP Cloud Integration.

Change Tracking Tool. In the change tracking tool we have added the ability to see all repository objects and what is changed. So you can see where in an object it changed, we will add the option also to do a comparison in UDF and Message mapping in a future version. The cool thing is that you now can see where a message mapping is used and in which ICO/iFlows it is used. This will give users the option to run test report that covers the things that have been changed. We still have to add a few links.

 

If you are ready to start testing your SAP PI/PO/CPI solutions better then have a look at the Figaf IRT tool that allow you much better testing.