Tosca Cloud and The Shift to Continuous Quality in SAP

SAP organisations are moving towards cloud-based environments, where updates arrive faster and testing has to keep up. As the pace of change increases, testing needs to become a continuous part of how SAP environments are managed.

We spoke with Markku Riihonen, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Tricentis, about what this shift means for SAP Quality Engineering, and how organisations can prepare their testing capabilities for the years ahead.

Why SAP cloud requires continuous Quality Engineering

How is the move to cloud changing testing for SAP organisations?

Markku Riihonen: Moving from on-premises SAP environments to the cloud increases the pace of change significantly. With traditional on-premises SAP, you might have had a six-month release cycle. If you weren't introducing major changes yourself, you could organise testing around those releases. You prepared for an update, validated it and then had a relatively stable period until the next one.

Cloud ERP works at a different cadence. Updates increasingly follow SAP's schedule, with quarterly releases, continuous enhancements and new integrations requiring regular validation. Testing therefore needs to become a permanent capability embedded in the organisation's processes. 

That also increases the need for automation. I still meet organisations where business users perform much of the testing manually. That approach becomes difficult to sustain as the frequency of change increases. For organisations moving to cloud ERP, this is a good opportunity to expand automation and establish the people, processes and skills required for continuous Quality Engineering.

Where does Tosca Cloud fit into that shift?

Markku Riihonen: Tosca Cloud, or SAP Enterprise Continuous Testing by Tricentis (the name of the Solution Extension), is evolving alongside SAP's own move towards cloud-based environments. SAP customers now have S/4HANA Cloud, SAP Cloud ALM and the agent-led toolchain, so the Quality Engineering capabilities supporting that landscape also need to work effectively in the cloud.

Tosca Cloud provides a centrally managed automation platform that teams can access through a browser from different locations. SAP customers typically have complex, interconnected landscapes, with business processes running across S/4HANA, other SAP applications and third-party systems. Tosca Cloud allows organisations to automate testing across those end-to-end processes from a central platform. 

Tricentis is also an SAP Solution Extension partner, so customers can purchase our solutions directly through SAP. Our technology is integrated into SAP's agent-led toolchain, where we provide the Quality Engineering capabilities that support the broader transformation process. I sometimes describe Tricentis as the quality shield within that toolchain. 

Being in the cloud also allows us to make new capabilities available more easily. On-premises customers don't always upgrade whenever a new product version becomes available, which means they may not immediately benefit from the latest innovations. With Tosca Cloud, those capabilities can reach customers much faster. That's becoming particularly relevant as we introduce more AI functionality. 

Moving from Tosca on-premises to Tosca Cloud

What changes for organisations that already use Tosca on-premises?

Markku Riihonen: Customers that already know Tosca should find the transition relatively straightforward. Tosca Cloud has a more modern interface, while the principles behind the product remain familiar. We also provide migration tools and guidance for moving existing test assets.

Before migrating those assets, it's worth reviewing the testing inventory. Organisations can look at which tests are still relevant, where there is duplication and whether ownership is clearly defined. A migration provides a natural opportunity to clean up an environment that may have accumulated a large number of test assets over the years. 

Customers can also migrate gradually. SAP customers using SAP Enterprise Continuous Testing by Tricentis have access to the new SaaS version in addition to the current Commander version, for example. They can start creating new test assets in the cloud while continuing to use existing assets in the Commander.

The appropriate approach depends on the customer's existing environment and where they are in their automation journey. Personally, I would generally favour moving bit by bit instead of switching the entire environment at once.

What does cloud-based test execution change in practice?

Markku Riihonen: Elastic Execution Grid is a good example. With DEX, distributed execution on-premises, organisations need machines that contain the applications and infrastructure required to run their tests. They are responsible for providing, updating and maintaining that environment.

Elastic Execution Grid provides test execution capacity according to demand. If you need 20 parallel test runs this week, the required virtual machines can be made available. If you need less capacity next week, the environment can scale down accordingly. 

Tricentis manages the underlying infrastructure, so customers no longer have to maintain the servers and execution environment themselves. They can scale the capacity according to their testing requirements without maintaining infrastructure for peak demand throughout the year.

What are the main challenges when moving to Tosca Cloud?

Markku Riihonen: There are technical considerations. Organisations may need to integrate Tosca Cloud with existing CI/CD pipelines, support test execution against systems that aren't accessible from the cloud, and manage permissions across multiple enterprise teams. We have prescriptive guidance available for all this.

The organisational aspects deserve at least as much attention. During a migration, some organisations discover that their existing Tosca environment has developed into a sprawling library of tests with limited ownership. Tests may have become redundant over time, and it isn't always clear which assets still matter. Reviewing that environment forces organisations to decide what they want to retain and who will be responsible for it. 

Governance is another part of that discussion. Organisations need clear decisions about what gets automated, how test results are interpreted and how quality gates are applied.

Cloud access also makes Quality Engineering more visible across the organisation. Business users and decision-makers can be given appropriate roles and use a browser to view test runs, results and the automation being developed. Wider access makes clear ownership and governance increasingly important.

AI and agentic testing in Tosca Cloud

How are AI and agentic testing changing Tosca Cloud?

Markku Riihonen: AI is increasing the amount and speed of change across SAP environments. Agents are already being used to support software development, and SAP is introducing agents into business processes. Each change can affect other parts of an end-to-end process, so organisations need the ability to validate those processes continuously.

We're also bringing AI into test automation itself. Enterprise Continuous Testing by Tricentis includes AI-assisted automated test case generation. A user can describe a test in natural language, such as asking for a procure-to-pay test, provide the relevant data and have the agent work with applications such as SAP Fiori to generate the test automation. 

We expect agentic workflows to play a growing role in Quality Engineering. Functional testing will increasingly connect with capabilities such as change impact analysis, performance testing and data integrity testing, allowing more of the overall process to be orchestrated through AI.

This will also influence the work of Quality Engineering professionals. Their expertise will increasingly be applied to understanding what a test means, determining what needs to be validated and orchestrating the different testing activities. The operating model and the people responsible for it will remain extremely important as more of the execution becomes automated. 

Preparing SAP Quality Engineering for what comes next

What should SAP organisations be doing now to prepare for this future?

Markku Riihonen: Organisations should consider where they want Quality Engineering in their SAP programme to be three or five years from now.

SAP transformations are multi-year programmes, and the quality infrastructure being built today will influence how easily an organisation can adopt the capabilities SAP introduces over the coming years. That requires thinking about the platform architecture, operating model, skills and processes that will support the SAP environment as it evolves.

Partners like TTC Global have an important role in helping organisations make those decisions. Their contribution goes beyond implementing the technology. A partner needs to understand the customer's SAP landscape and help design a Quality Engineering operating model that fits it. Experience across multiple SAP environments is valuable because partners will already have encountered situations and edge cases that an individual customer may be facing for the first time. 

When evaluating Tosca Cloud, I would therefore look at it as part of the broader architecture decision. Start with where Quality Engineering needs to be in three to five years and work backwards from there. The capabilities, people and processes you establish now will determine how well you can accommodate the changes that are coming.