SAP ABAP - Is it Robust ?
Good morning all. It is a holiday season in India and I am also planning a week off from my work schedule starting today. But before I break, I wanted to put forward my thoughts about this topic that I has been there on my mind all for a long time now. I am an ABAP specialist and has been involved with multiple projects in various capacities over the last 9 years. And one consistent expectation I have experienced in every project is that the every client wants the best of the code to be developed for their system enhancements at the least of the costs and efforts.
Is it the inherent faith in SAP “the product”, that all a customer wants is already available and you just need to configure it or that ABAP actually is so robust that even if you move something to production it will necessarily work? I agree that SAP does have a strong Life Cycle Management component for ABAP and it has faithfully helped companies with the development process. It is so strong that SAP decided to retain the same principles even when they moved to Java and .Net. But that does not take away the need for well thought through process for development, the need for a neatly written code that is readable, easily maintainable, scalable and written using the latest and current code semantics. And the last part is very important. For backward compatibility SAP has never removed the original functionalities, but the intent was never to give an option to the client that chose between old and new. We have all seen how fast SAP has changed in last 10 years, we have seen how fast they have embraced open technologies in the last 10 years. All the new technology components were provided by SAP to keep us with time and ensure that we are putting the best possible technical solution to support the business and keep it agile.
But still year after year I have seen that clients and developers stick to the old code semantics, complete piece of code being written in haphazard way which nonetheless supports the business needs (black box philosophy), no peer/independent reviews, checkbox approach to testing by technical team, and building solution to the ‘just’ the customer need ‘today’, without consideration of the future trends. Still IT works, and every 3-4 years an upgrade or an re-implementation comes, that will provides them with an opportunity to clean up the system and the rigor starts again !!!
ABAP does instill good development principles in us and it is ROBUST in the way it continue to take development from developers with varied experiences and nothing ever crashes (before it is too late)…
