ABAP_to_the_Future

4
ABAP Test Cockpit
clearly thought about this sort of situation, and as a result the ABAP Test Cockpit
(ATC) was born, which is intended to make such checks mandatory in the development
process. The ATC was built based on the principle of separation of concerns:
one part of a program does one jo b only and—here’s the important bit—
does it well. When designing the ATC, SAP had two roles in mind, each with a different
concern: the ABAP developer, wh o writes the programs, and a so-called
quality manager, who makes sure the programmers are doing their jobs well. If
your company is in such a state that errors like short dumps keep popping up in
production, then you most likely do need some sort of central quality management
to get to the bottom of this. The aim of the game though is to get all your
developers to run so many tests in development—as a matter of routine—that
some sort of central quality management is no longer needed, at least on a micromanagement
level.
The ATC was made available in SAP NetW eaver 7.02 SP 12 and SAP NetWeaver
7.31 SP 5, and it comes as standard in SAP NetWeaver 7.4. Can you guess what
this means, dear reader? It’s time you learned how to use it.
A cockpit by its very nature is not a tool initself; it is an easier way to control several
underlying tools, and hopefully th e whole is greater than the sum of the
parts. Any extra static checks on code SAP comes up with are not added to the
ATC but rather to the underlying comp onents—for example, the Code Inspector—or
even to totally new components that are added with higher support stack
levels. However, having a cockpit makes such changes with each new release or
support stack much more transparent and thus easier to take advantage of.
Because the actual components of the ATC are not new in themselves, the purpose
of this chapter is to look at the most useful functionalities that the cockpit
itself can perform that the individual components can’t do on their own. The
chapter will start with a discussion of automatic runs of unit tests (Section 4.1)
and move on to mass checks (Section 4.2) . Finally, Section 4.3 will outline some
of the most recent enhancements to ABAPTest Cockpit so that you can make sure
that you’re taking advantage of all the checks that are available to you.
SAP HANA Migration
Please note that many of the functionalities discussed in this chapter—particularly some
of the more recent ABAP Test Cockpit enhancements—become especially useful if
you’re migrating to SAP HANA. However, you should consider using them in all databases!
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