This is the fifth in a series of posts counting down to the release of LiveCompare 2.3.  So far I’ve covered Extended Enhancement Pack Support, Send Email as Workflow Attachment, Integrating into the Wider Workflow, and Project Management Services.  In this post I’m going to look at LiveCompare’s new Support Stack Impact Analysis functionality.

One of the trends we’ve observed in the past 12-18 months is the switch by SAP and customers away from individual support packs to support stacks.  The basic idea is that SAP works to stack up compatible changes in a single bundle that customers implement.  For LiveCompare, this means longer analysis runtimes.

A test case of 3.5 million objects takes around 4 days to analyze with the Transport Impact Analysis template.  The same test case of 3.5m objects takes about 4 hours to analyze with the Support Stack Impact Analysis template.  Yes, really.  4 days reduced to 4 hours.  This chart shows the improvement very clearly:

The new technology in the Support Stack Impact Analysis template is an action called: Find Object Links.  Like Where Used this action is tasked with finding connecting pathways between changing objects and in-use transactions and programs.  The key implementation difference – and the one that delivers the significant performance gains – is a change in search strategy.  Find Object Links starts with the in-use transactions and looks for pathways to the changing objects.  Where Used (used in the Transport Impact Analysis workflow) starts with the changing objects and looks for pathways to the in-use transactions and programs.  Put simply, Find Object Links is ‘top-down’ and Where Used is ‘bottom-up’.

The Support Stack Impact Analysis goes further than identifying the impacted in-use transactions and programs.  LiveCompare uses its pathway analysis and data about how frequently the transactions and programs are used to reduce to a minimum the recommended transactions and programs to test.  This chart helps to explain LiveCompare’s method of automatically assessing the risk of impact:

The most at risk transactions and programs are those that are (a) used the most and (b) will see the greatest impact.  LiveCompare measure the degree of impact by looking at how long the pathways are connecting the transactions and programs to the changing objects.  Shorter pathways mean greater impact.

So if this new template is so fast why keep the Transport Impact Analysis template?

Each template is optimized for different scenarios.  For example, the Transport Impact Analysis template will be faster at analyzing a single SAP support pack or a small number of custom transports against a large set of used transactions and programs.  Support Stacks and, for example, the migration of the transports to production at the end of a project are best analysed with the new Support Stack Impact Analysis template.

The quality and speed of the Support Stack Impact Analysis workflow depends on having adequate performance history data.  So perhaps another situation where the Transport Impact Analysis workflow would be used is when less than 3 months of data is available.  Use the Survey Performance History Data workflow to see how much you have.

Conclusion

In response to the growing trend to implement SAP Support Stacks, LiveCompare 2.3 adds a new analysis template called: Support Stack Impact Analysis.  It delivers the same high-quality analysis that results in a 40%-80% reduction in testing effort with a runtime analysis that takes less than a day.