ITC Server

I have been reading “Enhancing the Quality of ABAP Development” book which is published by SAP Press.

What features do you need to look at to understand the quality of an ABAP program?

• Correctness: the quality of the data produced by the program.
• Stability: the degree to which the program behaves predictably from a technical point of view.
• User-friendliness: the usability of the program.
• Performance
• Maintainability: the degree to which program changes can be applied easily by developers other than original author of the program.

Correctness is usually okay for custom ABAP programs, since the output and functionality of the program is tested by coworkers and end-users.

Stability is very hard to test from technical point of view. Users cannot able to test the stability of the program. If they get dumps, that is okay. But other than that ABAP developers should be very careful for the program’s stability.

User-friendliness is not considered too much for custom ABAP programs. I have seen bad designed screen outputs. I do not understand why some ABAP developers still user WRITE style reports instead of ALV reports. On selection screen of a program, it is very good practice to use blocks.

Bad performance is a very bad headache for custom ABAP programs. ABAP developers - especially if they are in rush in a project - prefer quick but poor programs. They are not desire to write extra code to improve the performance. They do not use internal tables, just simply SELECT - ENDSELECT. We can give a lot of examples for performance issue.

Maintainability is very important. But again ABAP developers write the program for themselves. I have seen a lot of programs that I can claim even the original developer would struggle to maintain the program. No using INCLUDE, no subroutines, no functions, no ABAP objects, no standards, no naming conventions! In my company whenever I get a request to modify old custom program, I spend a lot of time to make the program more maintainability for future modifications. Because I know I will modify it later.

So there are many things to talk about the quality of ABAP programs. In Turkish we say “Bu hamur çok su götütür“, in English “This dough consumes too much water”

Tags: ABAP, quality

This entry was posted on Monday, March 9th, 2009 at 2:14 pm and is filed under SAP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.