“Test-driven development sounds great, but writing unit tests takes too much time with limited benefit.”
“We can’t use ABAP OO because our developers aren’t efficient with it.”
“We’d love to implement continuous deployment, but it’s not possible to push to production more often because of risk and controls.”
In the SAP development world, we all hear (and make!) excuses like these far too often. Almost always, these types of statements come in response to a suggestion aimed at improving the quality of development in the SAP, usually ABAP, environment. Yes, we’d love to improve quality, but doing so is just too expensive, risky, etc.
Because of these types of responses, I’m always on the lookout for lucid arguments that can help change the minds of decision-makers in the SAP development world, from developers to CIOs. Martin Fowler’s recent essay “Is High Quality Software Worth the Cost?” is just such an argument, going through, step-by-step, the value that is being left on the table by failing to improve software quality. I won’t summarize the argument, but suffice it to say that the result of improved software quality is faster development velocity with lower risk. The difficult part of this is that in the early stages, introducing improved software quality through better practices and tools does have a negative ROI. But over time the benefits are compounding, while the costs are constant, and the ROI becomes positive relatively quickly.
At Mindset and elsewhere in the SAP ecosystem, we have seen these benefits, but I also believe that there is much farther we can go. We also acknowledge that positive ROI from improved development quality can be longer in coming in SAP contexts than on other platforms because SAP development practices are often so far behind in areas like the use of distributed version control and automatically integrated development processes. I’ll be exploring these issues as we build out Mindset’s full suite of DevOps capabilities and services.
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