ABAP_to_the_Future

Foreword
toolsets your company should be adopting and what techniques should be considered
and mandated within your develo pment teams, rather than leaving it to
the programmers alone.
It’s now obvious to me that ABAP functi onality and the associated toolsets have
not stood still over the past decade, an d there are many tools that have been
around for 10 years or more that are still not exploited. It would appear that we
need to invest in the education of our ABAP programmers (and our web programmers
as these technologies converge) to ensure that we are doing things optimally,
allowing for ease of future prog ram maintenance, and providing an efficient
and self-documenting environment. After all, many of us will retire in the
next 10, 20, or 30 years, and we need to ensure that our IT assets are given the
best chance of survival long after we have departed.
Educating your programmers and giving them the extra time to come up to speed
could sound like a delay for your current program of work, but, as Paul explains,
over a computer program’s lifetime the initial writing accounts for only 5% of the
effort. The remaining 95% of the effort relates to future maintenance (through
enhancements, bug fixes, programmers needing to acquaint or reacquaint themselves
with the logic, testing, upgrades, etc.). Rather than taking shortcuts, it’s
worth the initial effort to write optimally the first time around.
I recommend this book to anyone in an IT department running SAP and hope you
find it as enlightening as I did. Hanson is fortunate to have the services of a great
programming team, and Paul has helped shine a light on it by his passion for
assisting others.
Rob Downing
Chief Information Officer
Hanson Australia Pty Ltd.
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