10 best practices to be a successful SAP ABAP developer
Successful and resourceful SAP ABAP developer
ABAP/ABAP OO development is very important to address any solution gap, RICEF or custom development in any SAP project. I believe that it is very important to know many different programming aspects during a SAP implementation project and to follow certain guidelines that can make a SAP ABAP professional very successful in his career.
Steps to be an efficient SAP ABAP programmer or SAP technical team leader
1. Review business requirements and write functional specification
The first part of any ABAP development project begins with meeting with the end users or business experts and understanding the business requirements that need to be implemented in the SAP system during the realization phase. A better approach is to hold workshops to collect all the business requirements. Make sure that if any SAP function consultants are involved, they are also at the meetings. Once all business requirements have been gathered, a SAP functional consultant or business expert will write a detailed functional specification. Review the functional specification until the document has all the details, different business scenarios, and expected goals clearly defined. A well-defined functional specification should contain UML diagrams and test case scenarios. It is important to have official approval of the functional specification before proceeding with design and development.
two. Review ABAP development standards
Ideally, your SAP project leader or ABAP development manager should have created a programming guidelines and standards document. Review this document to follow the naming conventions for portlets, classes, dictionary objects, software components, namespaces and proxies (if using SAP XI/PI), program input/output parameters, etc., only to name a few. Following the project guide helps maintain a consistent coding approach and also helps other functional and technical analysts read and debug your code. ABAP object naming must start with Z if it will be migrated to the SAP production system and with Y if it will not be migrated to the production system.
3. Write and review test cases
Test case documents are written by SAP business experts or functional consultants on most SAP implementation projects. But in some SAP implementation projects, a programmer may be required to write test cases. Before writing a test case, thoroughly review the functional specification document and review the written test case with your business users or functional consultants. Get an approval as mentioned in most of the steps in this article. As ABAP Development Manager for a variety of SAP implementation projects, my goal has been to keep my team motivated and always cover the team against any scope changes in development tasks. Having a sign-off at each phase of a custom SAP development or enhancement task always helps the SAP implementation team and the project management team stay in sync, which is vital to completing the SAP implementation on time and on budget.
Four. Write and review technical design specifications
Read the functional specification and list all the development objects that would be required to implement the required functionality in the SAP system. The first step is to draw a flowchart and review it with technical and business experts. The technical design document should include a technical description, a list of new database objects, ABAP objects that can be reused, a data model, and a class diagram (if ABAP OO classes are used). Having a rough prototype in the sandbox system (Development System if no SAP sandbox system is available) is highly recommended if the development being done is complex or if the final deliverable is not well defined. Then you need to review your prototype with functional experts and business users. Make sure the ABAP development team leader or manager approves the prototype. If the effort required to complete the ABAP scheduling task is not presented and approved by senior project management, then this would be a good time to get approval of the development estimate and schedule.
5. Realization of the Specification – ABAP Development
During this step, you will create development objects and deploy the code to the SAP development system. Before you begin, if the prototype was done in the sandbox, review the prototype and the design specification. Remember that quality and reusability of existing ABAP objects are more important than strictly following the design specification. Determine which existing dictionary objects can be reused for this topic. If new classes or dictionary objects need to be created, make sure that these objects can be extended and reused for other development tasks. It may take additional effort to develop objects that are reusable and flexible. This one-time effort to build reusable ABAP objects during the course of a development project can potentially save a lot of work programming similar objects that might otherwise use already built objects. Review your approach with a SAP technical team leader or development manager on your project before deviating from the technical design specification and implementing your own ideas. If you are involved in tasks related to SAP XI (now Process Integration) or creating business services, then this is the best area where you could reuse existing objects. Review the message types that already exist within your SAP business unit and see if existing messages can be extended with new fields. Review with the team leader whether the communication should be synchronous or asynchronous before generating proxies.
6. SAP Development Best Practices
SAP ABAP (or JAVA if working in SAP Netweaver) development best practices should be followed throughout the project development lifecycle. Although this aspect depends on the technical manager of your project, I have personally maintained a checklist for the developers on my team on all projects and have been very successful in delivering high quality results on all development tasks. Here are some best practices worth adapting to your project. Check whether you adhere to all the naming conventions described in the programming standards established for your implementation project. Include comments in your code to allow someone else to easily understand your programs. This is particularly useful when you are working in large teams and multiple people are working on the same objects. Be sure to check user authorization if you are creating transactions or web user interfaces that will require human interaction. Check that you don’t have any ABAP code segments that can affect performance, such as nested loops, nested select statements (use views if you want), excessive database commits (lingering objects or buffering alternatives can be a good option), etc. Field symbols are a great advantage when it comes to processing internal tables and also variables with unknown data types that are resolved at runtime. Field symbols are very similar to the concept of using pointers in the OO programming landscape. Check if all exceptions are handled and if error messages are accurately communicated to end users. As an ABAP programmer, it should be well accepted now that short dumps should not occur. This all happens in unknown special case scenarios, short dumps need to be fixed.
7. ABAP code reviews and performance
As an ABAP programmer, you must test your code on completion for all possible scenarios. Verify that the final results are the same as expected in the documented test cases. Perform an ABAP runtime analysis to check the performance of your code. Seek suggestions from your technical team leader or manager on how to improve code performance if you notice any red flags during runtime analysis. Schedule a formal code review with your mentor or a senior ABAP developer once development has been completed and tested by all responsible developers. Do the checks and retest your code with the desired result as documented in the test scripts. Remember that code reviews are not to find flaws in your programming, they will only make you a better ABAP developer and maintain consistency.
8. Documentation
Be sure to write end-user documents with an overview of the functionality or enhancement upon completion. Include screenshots when possible. Prepare the documentation keeping in mind that an end user who is not familiar with your delivery can read the document and test the functionality. Include contact information in this document so that users can easily contact the SAP technical team if they have any questions.
9. User acceptance testing
Now that your ABAP coding is complete and reviewed by technical experts, it’s time for formal user acceptance testing by business users. UAT testers will check whether the output meets business process requirements and suggest improvements or modifications to the delivered functionality. After completing these fixes or modifications, you must request a formal approval of the functionality.
10 Migration to SAP Test System and Production System
QA engineers will test your functionality in the SAP QA environment to verify that everything works on its delivered functionality, as tested during user acceptance testing. Also, any problems in transporting your ABAP objects through SAP systems will be identified and addressed during this step. If no issues are found, your transports will be approved for migration to the SAP production system in the next transport cycle.
You have just learned how to be an efficient SAP ABAP developer, or so to speak, a high-quality senior ABAP expert from writing the specifications to implementing them in the production system. Use this article as a guide, as there are many more aspects to improve and be a good ABAP programmer that it is not possible to cover in a short article like this. You can always contact me with any suggestions or ideas you may be looking for for your SAP implementation.