SAP API Testing Basics – why should Enterprise Companies use this approach?

SAP API Testing Basics

APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are the backbone of Enterprise Companies. Because in today’s world most Enterprises can’t sell, buy or ship without using APIs.

Yet despite their critical role in companies’ ability to operate, SAP API Testing is often an overlooked approach. In this article you’ll find the basics regarding SAP API Testing, its advantages and the challenges it solves.

The article is based on a conversation between Michał Krawczyk and Mateusz Nowak from one of the episodes of the “Navigating SAP API Testing” show that you can find below:

And by the way… The fact that we can show you the video above on our website is also thanks to APIs. Let’s dive in!

What are “APIs”?

API is an Application Programming Interface. The APIs allow two different programs or systems to interact with one another. It’s a set of rules that define how the information will get exchanged between the programs or systems. Sometimes they are referred to as simply “Interfaces”.

So much for a definition, but let’s look at a simple example that can highlight, just how important the APIs are for the health of your business:

Simple Example

Imagine that you’d like to order a new chair from IKEA. As a user, you’d simply go to IKEA’s website, select the chair that you’d like to purchase, add it to the cart, input your information and make a payment. It’s a simple, 5 minute task on your end. And you don’t even have to call anyone on the phone.

But from IKEA’s side, there were a lot of APIs involved.

• To show you only the available chairs, the website has to check which chairs are available in the warehouse. It’s done through APIs.
• To take your order, the website has to place a Purchase Order in your SAP system. It’s done through APIs.
• In order to issue a delivery, the Sales Order has to be passed to the warehouse. It’s done through APIs.

 
So selling is done through APIs. Invoicing is done through APIs. Shipping is done through APIs. Most crucial business processes will at some point involve APIs. 

SAP APIs are critically important – “APIs” are to your business what “water” is to a human

Your company is integrated with dozens or hundreds of systems, partners and suppliers through thousands of interfaces. And as you can see APIs are behind your most important business processes. Because you can argue that there are no processes that are more important than selling, buying and shipping. 

Costs of outages or errors can be huge

40% of Enterprises say that an hourly downtime costs top 1 million USD. And for some industries, it can even top 5 million USD. If you cannot sell for a day, your customers won’t always be able to wait.

For example, in 2015, a half-day outage of the Apple Store cost the company an estimated 25 million dollars. 

But these are just the direct costs. A critical outage can also cause increased customer support costs, penalties or other legal costs, and long-lasting reputational damage. Because if for example your customers expect you to deliver the goods within 24 hours and you’re unable to keep your guarantees, it may cause customer dissatisfaction. 

And similar to water – there’s no replacement. 

If it wasn’t enough, it’s not only selling, buying and shippings that’s on the line.

If your APIs are not working, it’d be extremely difficult to go back to the “manual mode” and retype everything or use phones/e-mails to communicate. Simply take a look at what Airport staff had to do during a global outage that happened in July 2024:

To sum it up – APIs are essential in Enterprise Companies daily operations. And they are everywhere you look.

This is an API world. And we’re just living in it.

Why is SAP API Testing often overlooked?

With the rise of popularity of the SAP Clean Core and Composable ERP approach, the SAP APIs are only getting more important. So why are they so overlooked by many companies?

The SAP APIs are somehow similar to editing in movies. When they are great, nobody notices them. To most people, they would only be visible if there are problems with them. So one of the reasons that the APIs are so neglected is that almost nobody in the organization sees them working. 

If you go to an online store, you expect that you’ll be able to make a purchase. And by most people, this is treated as a given.

What is the SAP API Testing?

The point of testing in SAP is to make sure that your end-to-end business flows are working as they are supposed to. But approaches such as Automated E2E Testing are hardly possible to successfully implement.

The SAP API Testing allows you to check if your APIs are working correctly, with coordinating the testing efforts with hundreds of partners or external resources.

Most of the SAP APIs are managed by some kind of middleware platforms that are sitting between your SAP system and the external systems. And these systems will usually persist the messages that were exchanged in the past. 

It means that your company probably has a huge library of real messages that your SAP system exchanged with the non-SAP systems. So SAP API Testing allows you to resume your reliable messages that were previously exchanged in your production environment and automatically validate if your SAP APIs are working as they did before.

Here’s the in-depth explanation of how you can leverage the existing communication to create thousands of test cases.

Why should you use SAP API Testing?

The SAP API Testing allows you to massively retest your APIs. Even in the early stages of your project or in some cases daily in the business-as-usual stage.

What’s more – testing APIs is usually hard to perform because of the External Dependencies – meaning, that normally, you’d have to coordinate your testing with your partners, suppliers or staff of external systems. Thanks to the modern tools such as Int4 Suite, you can decouple your SAP system and become truly independent in your testing activities:

Take advantage of shift-left approach

SAP API Testing is also much faster and easier to implement than E2E testing – which means that you can start testing faster and detect issues earlier – which allows you to take advantage of the shift-left approach. Which is explained in the following video.

SAP API Testing allows you to stay innovative

Ineffective testing slows down your innovation process. Because without it, you cannot confidently make changes in your systems, that would add tremendous value to it. It’s simple – if you cannot test, you cannot innovate.

Introducing Int4 Suite

Int4 Suite is an SAP-native API Testing and Service Virtualization platform, that allows you to retest your SAP APIs on scale.

If you’d like to learn more about the platform, schedule a demo by filling out the form below.