Ensuring Quality of SAP Custom ABAP Codes

In today’s rapidly advanced business world led to evolution of various customer systems that contains billions of lines of custom ABAP (Advanced Business Application Programming) code to make the organization competitive. But unfortunately, most of the custom ABAP code suffers because of structural weakness. And outsourcing happens to be the primary reason.

“A lot of these folks are not trained in computer science,” says CAST Research SVP and report co-author Bill Curtis, of the business-side employees who often oversee customization projects. “You’re kind of at the mercy of the talent of the outsourcer.”

CAST Research has introduced a new study that examines nearly 78 custom SAP ABAP applications that contains nearly 50 million lines of code. About half of them comes from leading manufacturing companies and businesses, while ones from government organizations and retailers were also in the sample. Almost, everything was outsourced.

While CAST’s analysis revealed the ABAP custom code’s quality was “generally consistent with scores observed in CRASH research for applications developed in several other languages…, the number and density of violations is high in every health factor, and this should be of concern for many applications,” according to the report.

More than half of the violations found were basic software engineering errors, suggesting that inexperienced coders committed them. Maybe, the most eye-opening finding? Developers adhered to five critical ABAP coding rules only one-third of the time.

Something important to note here is that CAST’s report focuses on the code’s structural quality, and not how well it maps to customer’s functional requirements.

To wit, from the report: “Structural quality flaws are the defects most likely to cause operational problems such as outages, performance degradation, unauthorized access or data corruption.”

In other words, that customer-facing portal might look pretty and have all the right buttons and screens, but it sure does load slowly, if at all. And it just went down after getting hacked.

Curtis offers his own analogy. “I can do things inside a house to make it look really nice,” he says. “The question is, will the walls stand up if there’s an earthquake?”

Not enough people resource

Outsourcing companies often have “got so much work that they’re really struggling to get enough people to staff all the projects,” Curtis says. “We can see that in the way some of the codes are written.”

There are some steps customers can take to ensure their outsourced custom code’s quality. Number one: “They’ve got to involve IT,” Curtis says.

It’s also crucial to develop a vigorous, ongoing code-quality and inspection program in your enterprise, according to the report. (It’s not surprising CAST would say that, given its business, but the point stands nonetheless.)

There’s Just ‘No Excuse’ for Bad ABAP Code

“I don’t think anybody is going to disagree. There is a lot of dodgy ABAP programming going on out there,” SAP Press author and senior ABAP programmer Paul Hardy says via email.

“It could be argued that the small sample of programs [CAST] used were not statistically significant, but I would say that if they had analysed a thousand times more than they actually did the result would have been identical,” he adds.