PDF verification for cross-technology End2End testing of SAP processes

13. June 2024

Blog, Uncategorized

Why is testing PDF documents so important?

The digital transformation of many organisations means that they are handling their business processes electronically from start to finish and digitally connecting their business partners – whether suppliers, authorities, partners or customers – to these processes.
These can be both incoming and outgoing interfaces, machine-readable files or even popular output formats such as PDFs.
Media or system breaks always pose a certain risk of errors. In addition to interface tests between individual systems, particular attention must therefore be paid to output formats such as PDF, which are also complex (both technologically and in terms of automatic verifiability), when it comes to quality assurance.

PDFs in interaction with SAP systems

Errors at interfaces between ERP systems and file outputs can have far-reaching consequences for the company, including legal consequences. If companies use PDFs as output formats, it is essential to check them regularly and precisely for content, format and correct presentation. Scenarios such as outgoing invoices, order confirmations and contracts – to name just a few – are popular use cases in which unchangeable PDF documents are output from SAP systems.
In this context, it is not enough to rely on checking the input sources for these PDFs before they are generated. The format break between SAP and the generated output document harbours a source of risk that cannot be ignored in state-of-the-art quality assurance.

Test awareness in connection with PDF documents

Fortunately, the market is aware of this source of error and many companies are paying a certain amount of attention to checking input and output formats as part of their quality assurance.
The flip side of the coin, however, is that this quality assurance is usually carried out manually.
For many companies, the complexity and possibilities of automated verification represent too great an entry barrier to test these parts of the processes automatically.
A recent survey of companies with regard to the focus of quality assurance of interfaces and incoming and outgoing business documents shows that the tests are focussed on the following aspects:

Correctness of the content of generated files

Is the correct and relevant content displayed on the PDF?
Nothing is more fatal in terms of data protection, for example, than transmitting sensitive data to the wrong recipients.

Positioning and therefore correctness of the data in the context of the overall output

Of course, the mere presence of content on a document is usually not enough. It is also crucial

Legal correctness

Is all legally relevant content displayed appropriately for the respective scenario? For example, are legal formulations required as invoice addenda?

Correctness of the output data depending on the variant / scenario

This concerns, for example, the presentation of the different tax treatment of domestic, EU or non-EU deliveries, discount rates and much more.

Companies cannot afford to send unclear or, even worse, incorrect documents to customers, authorities, partners or suppliers. As can be seen from the above points, the verification requirements are heterogeneous and together increase the complexity of the quality assurance requirements. The associated effort and demands on manual testing increase enormously and represent a risk for companies.

Content structure-based test automation for PDF verification

Automated testing must aim to maximise the verification options and, ideally, reduce the testing effort to almost zero.
Standard market automation approaches fail on one of two key requirements:

Support of all necessary test requirements (see list above in the article)
Complexity of use and maintenance and the resulting effort

The challenge for test automation is therefore to offer a wide range of functions for recognising individual elements in PDF documents – combined with a high level of usability and a comprehensive toolbox of verification options.

Usability is usually very easy to judge. Judge for yourself whether the interface is intuitive and easy to understand and whether you would be able to find your way around after weeks of not using the tool.

However, the following question is essential!
Are test cases easy to map without any programming steps or manageable without any other technical skills?

The technical stability of the generated test cases, the range of verification options offered and the simple mapping of similar variants that differ in just a few points – coupled with usability – help to meet your company’s verification requirements for the critical test aspect ‘PDF output format’.
Most PDF test tools on the market are complex to use and are mainly image or screen position based. This means that content is recognised based on its appearance and/or position on the screen. If this position changes, recognition is no longer clearly possible.

Automated verification of image-based documents, such as PDF formats, has not been able to gain a foothold in the past due to the limited range of functions, complex use and unreliable test results, which has led many companies to rely on manual testing of these documents.

Automation tools with content structure-based element recognition

If automation tools such as the suxxesso Tool Suite also support the content structure-based recognition of elements, this opens up numerous additional possibilities for carrying out extensive verifications of your incoming and outgoing documents.
For example, according to the study cited above, the essential verification of relating elements to each other based on their position in the document.

Suddenly it is very easy to verify item line information individually and reliably.
Modern test automation tools enable a massive increase in your test coverage, thus ensuring your system quality and maximising the efficiency of your test cycles.

Convince yourself of the scope and user-friendliness of state-of-the-art test automation approaches such as the suxxesso Tool Suite!

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