SAP Concur Testing

Hari Mahesh

Concur Technologies, now SAP Concur, is an American software-as-a-service (SaaS) company providing travel and expense management services to businesses and individuals. The company’s software solutions are designed to simplify and automate booking travel, managing expenses, invoicing, and analyzing business spending.

Concur’s platform integrates with various travel suppliers, credit card companies, and ERP systems, offering users a comprehensive tool for managing their business travel and expenses. This integration allows for the automatic capture of expense data, reducing the need for manual entry and increasing accuracy and compliance with company policies.

SAP Concur offers products and services that help businesses automate and manage their travel and expense processes. These products include:

• Concur Travel: A travel booking and management platform that allows businesses to book flights, hotels, and other travel arrangements.
• Concur Expense: An expense management platform that allows employees to submit expense reports and businesses to track and reimburse expenses.
• Concur Invoice: An invoice management platform that allows businesses to automate receiving, approving, and paying invoices.

Testing Concur Applications

Most Concur applications are written in Java as a core platform; APIs and UI must be tested thoroughly before deploying them. Different test strategies can be referred to based on the testing pyramid. Let’s review each phase and analyze what testing tools are best suited.

Unit Testing

In unit testing, individual units or components of a software application are tested in isolation from the rest. The primary goal of unit testing is to validate that each unit of the software performs as designed. It can be an entire module, a single function, method, procedure, object, or any other component that can be independently executed.

Since Concur apps are written in Java and JavaScript and mobile apps are in Swift and Kotlin, let’s review some of these languages’ most commonly used unit testing tools.

• JUnit: It is a popular Java testing framework that lets you write small, isolated tests for individual code units like functions or classes. It helps ensure each part of your code works as expected under various conditions. JUnit provides annotations to identify test methods, and it offers assertions to test expected results, enabling developers to check if their code behaves as expected quickly. The framework supports test organization into test suites, which can aggregate multiple tests for comprehensive testing coverage.
• Jest: It is an open-source testing framework developed by Facebook, primarily used for JavaScript and React applications. Jest provides features like snapshot testing, test coverage reports, and a powerful mocking library, making it well-suited for unit testing as well as more complex functional testing of JavaScript applications.
• Robolectric: Enables unit testing of Android code without relying on a physical device or the Android framework. This speeds up testing significantly and allows testing code that interacts with device-specific features in a controlled environment.
• XCTest: Apple’s built-in unit testing framework is closely integrated with Xcode for a streamlined development experience. It offers a rich set of testing assertions and works well with other Apple testing tools like UI and Performance Testing.

Integration Testing

In integration testing, a software application’s individual units or components are combined and tested as a group. The primary purpose of integration testing is to identify and address issues related to the interaction between different software parts. This includes testing the interfaces and data flow between modules to ensure they work together as intended. Integration testing is crucial because while individual units may function correctly independently, issues often arise when combined.

We can perform integration testing via UI and API testing for Concur apps. Let us see what are the commonly used tools.

For API integration testing, the below tools are widely used:

• Postman: It is a popular tool used for API testing, allowing testers to design, build, and test APIs in a simple, user-friendly interface. It supports various types of HTTP requests, such as GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE, and can handle different data formats including JSON, XML, and form data. Postman enables users to create collections of requests, automate tests, and analyze responses, facilitating both manual and automated testing.
• Soap UI: It is an open-source web service testing application for service-oriented architectures (SOA) and representational state transfers (REST). It allows users to create, execute, and automate tests for web services. SoapUI features a user-friendly interface for sending requests to web services, inspecting responses, and simulating high-load scenarios. It supports testing of functional, regression, compliance, and security aspects of web services.

For UI integration testing, we can use the following:

• Selenium
• Cypress

We will discuss Selenium and Cypress more in the end-to-end testing phase.

End-to-End testing

E2E testing ensures that the workflow of an application is performing as designed from start to finish. The purpose of E2E testing is to simulate real user scenarios and validate the system under test, as well as its components, for integration and data integrity. It aims to ensure that the application behaves as expected in a production-like environment, covering all operations it performs.

This type of testing is conducted from the user’s perspective to test the entire system, including its interfaces with external systems and databases, network communications, and other aspects, to ensure a complete and thorough verification of the software product.

In Concur applications, we can perform E2E testing using the following:

• Selenium
• Cypress
• testRigor

We have discussed a lot about Selenium in many of our blogs, so we are not going into much depth about Selenium. Once the industry’s favorite automation tool, it couldn’t change as per the changing market needs. The tedious and time-consuming code maintenance and untrustworthy reports due to XPath failures made Selenium not a good choice for E2E testing. There are many other disadvantages of using Selenium. You can refer here if you would still like to know about building Selenium tests.

It’s a similar story with Cypress, too. Depending on programming languages, Cypress gets more complex as the team automates more test cases, making it harder to debug. Again, Cypress also depends on XPath, which creates more false-positive bugs. Additionally, Cypress has many more limitations, like browser support not being much for Firefox and Edge, etc. So, Cypress also is not a preferred tool anymore.

testRigor

As we mentioned about the disadvantages of using traditional tools, testRigor replaced all these tools. It is a codeless automation tool powered by AI. Many codeless automation tools are available in the market, but testRigor stands out from all of them because of its powerful features. So, let’s dive to know more about those features.

• Cloud-hosted: testRigor is a cloud-hosted tool, so you do not need to invest money and resources to set up an environment and maintain the software. Just subscribe and start creating automation scripts.
• Eliminate Code Dependency: testRigor helps to create test scripts in parsed plain English, eliminating the need to know programming languages. So, any stakeholder, like manual QA, BA, sales personnel, etc., can create test scripts and execute them faster than an average automation engineer using legacy testing tools. Also, since it works in natural language, anyone can create or update test cases, increasing the coverage.
• One Tool For All Testing Types: testRigor performs more than just web automation. It can be used for:
  • Web and Mobile browser testing
  • Mobile app testing
  • Desktop app testing
  • API testing
  • Visual testing
  • Accessibility testing

So you don’t have to install different tools for different types of testing. testRigor takes care of all your testing needs singlehandedly.

• Stable Element Locators: Unlike traditional tools that rely on specific element identifiers, testRigor uses a unique approach for element locators. You simply describe elements by the text you see on the screen, leveraging the power of AI to find them automatically. This means your tests adapt to changes in the application’s UI, eliminating the need to update fragile selectors constantly. This helps the team focus more on creating new use cases than fixing the flaky XPaths.
• Integrations: testRigor offers built-in integrations with most of the popular CI/CD tools like Jenkins and CircleCI, test management systems like Zephyr and TestRail, defect tracking solutions like Jira and Pivotal Tracker, infrastructure providers like AWS and Azure, and communication tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams.

You can go through more features of testRigor and its documentation.

Conclusion

Applications like SAP Concur have applications on different platforms, so keeping multiple frameworks using various automation tools is time-consuming and causes massive maintenance effort. Each framework needs to be managed separately. This, in turn, causes a hit to the testing cycle.

Using intelligent and innovative tools like testRigor, where you have one common framework for all types of testing, saves a tremendous amount of time in execution and accelerates the release time cycle immensely.

“We spent so much time on maintenance when using Selenium, and we spend nearly zero time with maintenance using testRigor.”

Keith Powe VP Of Engineering - IDT