Impact of SAP ABAP in today's Business world

Over the years, SAP had evolved as a one of the popular ERP for its extensive capabilities. ABAP (Advanced Business Application Programming) is a programming language for developing applications for the SAP R/3 system, a widely-installed business application subsystem. The latest version, ABAP Objects, is object-oriented programming. SAP will run applications written using ABAP/4, the earlier ABAP version, as well as applications using ABAP Objects.

SAP's original business model for R/3 was developed before the idea of an object-oriented model was widespread. The transition to the object-oriented model reflects an increased customer demand for it. ABAP Objects uses a single inheritance model and full support for object features such as encapsulation, polymorphism, and persistence.

All SAP products are moving to SAP HANA, the most talked about SAP innovation in recent times. This evolution intensifies the demands on SAP NetWeaver Application Server ABAP (AS ABAP) to best leverage the features and capabilities of the SAP HANA database. As an ABAP developer, you might ask, what is important and necessary to know concerning ABAP development for SAP HANA?

There are billions of lines of custom ABAP code running in customer systems around the world, and plenty of it works just fine. But a significant component of it suffers from serious structural weaknesses, and outsourcing is a primary culprit, according to CAST Research, a subsidiary of code-quality vendor CAST Software.

“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 launched a new study that examines 78 custom SAP ABAP applications consisting collectively of nearly 50 million lines of code. About half of them came from manufacturing companies while ones from government entities and retailers were also prominent in the sample. Nearly all were outsourced.

While CAST’s analysis found the ABAP custom code’s quality was “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,” according to the report.

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