How to ensure quality of a SAP ABAP HANA code?

The SAP HANA runs billions of ABAP code created by several SAP HANA developers across the computer systems of the customers around the world. And, majority of them are working fine and everything is at ease. But, at the same time, there are also significant suffering found on the components that is mainly found to be the result of structural weakness. Many evaluations revealed that outsourcing the SAP HANA ABAP code projects happens to be main culprit in brining those issues into the SAP ABAP system (according to CAST Research).

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

A new study initiated by CAST Research (CAST, a subsidiary of CAST software - code-quality checking vendor) had examined 78 various custom SAP ABAP applications that contained almost 50 million lines of code collectively. Manufacturing companies, government entities and retailers accounted for more than half of the collection. The analysis revealed that almost all were outsourced.

The following was the official report from that analysis

“Generally consistent with scores observed in CRASH research for applications developed in other languages…, the number and density of violations is high in every health factor, and this should be of concern for many applications,”

Errors accounted

Nearly 50% of the violations are engineering errors in the software which clearly signifies the involvement of coders with inadequate expertise and experience. And also, the coders did not follow the optimistic standards to achieve structural quality of the code. There is also a significant negligence on the part of adhering to the critical rules to cope the code well to map with the functional requirements of the customers.

“Structural quality flaws are the defects most likely to cause operational problems such as outages, performance degradation, unauthorized access or data corruption.” – According to report. This clearly shows that the backend quality and user experience with functionality is heavily compromised. “I can do things inside a house to make it look really nice. The question is, will the walls stand up if there’s an earthquake?” Curtis said.

Outsourcing

Curtis also explained that “outsourcing companies have got so much work that they’re really struggling to get enough people to staff all the projects. We can see that in the way some of the code is written.” The failure to adhere with the quality constrains by the outsourcing developers leads to such misled ABAP code generations and thereby affecting the quality of SAP customer system. This alarming identifications led to severe demand on future generations of SAP ABAP HANA coders to be screened for their ability in producing qualitative ABAP code to survive the situation.