Beginners Guide to ERP Testing

ERP can be elaborated as Enterprise Resource Planning, i.e if an organization is planning to increase the productivity by increasing its resources then it is ERP. Here resources are known as 4M’s - Man, Machine, Method, and Material.

Importance of ERP Testing

Without proper test planning and the testing majority of ERP projects tends to fail. Firstly the variations of ERP system has to be understood by testing professions to understand the importance of ERP Testing.There are multiple versions of ERP available for multiple domains targeting multiple customers. For example:

1-SAP Insurance- Targets the Insurance companies.
2-SAP Banking- Targets the Banking companies.
3-SAP Chemical- Targets the Chemical companies.

Similarly, the products from Oracle, PeopleSoft, Siebel etc. each has different feature and targets difference area of customers, industries, and the testers responsibility is to understand the full responsibility and purpose of the functionalities of this system 

There are two types of testing teams available in ERP 

1-Core testing team which test the base ERP software with static functionalities
2-Implementation testing team which focuses on testing the implementation of the project with dynamic and customized functionalities.

When a functionality is customized according to the requirements, these functionalities impacts other modules too so testing should be in such a way that every possibility should be traced

ERP companies have the dedicated testing teams for their systems.Testing such a large system
Required automation. As per the system requirements, ERP companies design their own automated testing framework and set-up their testing infrastructure.

Why ERP Testing is critical

ERP testing is critical in ways if the test plans don’t cover the whole implementation phase.All modules of the system are integrated and related to each other. Whenever a case is written on the business use case, a tester's responsibility is to understand the whole workflow of functionality and dependency as due to inter-related impact will be higher and the cases will fail or remain incomplete