SparxSystems CE: Clear diagrams for SAP ABAP OO developments

Gobas GmbH is an association of various IT companies from the Braunschweig and Hanover area with a focus on SAP development and consulting as well as .NET development. Due to the increasing use of model-driven software development in the SAP environment, they started developing Gobas q.trans about five years ago. With the new Q.TRANS/4EA plug-in for SAP ABAP OO, a genuine integration into Enterprise Architect has been achieved, without any media discontinuity and with a significant reduction in the technology stack. Previously, Enterprise Architect and the SAP system were not connected directly, but by means of an XMI file. Gobas q.trans therefore had to be installed on the SAP system, which many customers wanted to avoid. The new plug-in in Enterprise Architect has its own menu to make it as easy as possible for users to use. "We now do not need to install any source code on the SAP system for the integration. This means that Enterprise Architect interacts directly with the SAP system and data can be prepared in diagrams for analysis, documentation, etc. This is done at the click of a mouse, the resulting model is immediately available and can be analysed as desired and further processed with the full range of functions of Enterprise Architect," explains CEO Markus Abel of Gobas.

Always keep the overview

As IT is used intensively in more and more business areas today, it is not easy to maintain an overview in the emerging IT landscapes. Of course, this also applies to SAP development projects run by the company itself and their interdependencies. "As SAP consultants, we see in our daily practice how the challenges in the companies are growing. Therefore, we pursued the idea of making customer-specific ABAP coding more comprehensible and controllable. Our product Q.TRANS/4EA makes it possible not only to show the interdependencies of the applications via UML models, but also to actively support the users in optimising them," emphasises Abel. In addition to the UML models, proven methods for quality assessment (metrics) of the created software are used for the analysis. In the previous version of the product, these metrics had to be imported at great expense. Now this is elegantly solved visually: the diagrams created in Enterprise Architect can be analysed more quickly and specifically according to various metrics by colouring them.

With over 850,000 users worldwide, Enterprise Architect from Sparx Systems is widely used as a modelling platform. The use in the dynamic SAP environment addressed by Gobas opens up a wide range of users: "We are pleased that Gobas has succeeded in achieving a genuine integration between Enterprise Architect and SAP. This makes it possible for companies using SAP to quickly gain an overview of the system and the networking of IT. Thanks to the clear graphical presentation, maintenance and development of SAP systems can be accelerated significantly. We are convinced that Gobas will generate widespread interest with this solution, as the ongoing development of IT is a central key to economic success," emphasises Hans Bartmann, CEO of SparxSystems Central Europe.

Understand existing applications and expand them in a targeted manner

In the new PlugIn version, Q.TRANS/4EA offers a wide range of analysis options for the SAP software you have created yourself, represented in Enterprise Architect models. This link creates a synchronisation between the individual SAP source code and the corresponding UML model. The model shows exactly what was programmed with ABAP OO. The prerequisite for the interaction of the two systems is the installation of SAP Netweaver 7.4 and Enterprise Architect version 13 or higher.

Thanks to this interaction, it is therefore quickly clear, even in the face of an unmanageable number of development objects, at which point a correction or function extension must be inserted and what effects this has on the entire construct. With the "Reverse Engineering" function, the architecture of an ABAP OO application can be displayed with a few mouse clicks in the modelling tool. There you get a graphically prepared UML model, i.e. the construction manual of the respective application. With the overview gained in this way, the time and effort required to correct a malfunction or create a function extension is considerably reduced. At the same time, the risk of wrong decisions and undesirable developments is reduced. "It is known from statistics that about half of the development time of software applications is spent on troubleshooting and dependency analysis. This alone clearly shows the benefit of our solution, as it considerably shortens precisely these time-consuming procedures," concludes Abel. In addition, modelling has another advantage: the software documentation that previously had to be kept manually in SAP is created semi-automatically in the modelling tool and is also prepared accordingly at the same time.

Highlights of the Enterprise Architect PlugIn Q.TRANS/4EA

• Short development times
• Reduced maintenance costs
• Clean and secure documentation
• Reliable evaluation of technical source code quality by means of metrics
• Direct access from Enterprise Architect to SAP systems
• Modern interfaces

About the Gobas Group

Gobas GmbH is an association of various IT companies from the Braunschweig and Hanover area and pursues the goal of holistically dealing with various technical issues in the field of modern IT. Long-term customer loyalty and strategic thinking determine the actions of the company, which has many years of experience in the fields of SAP, software development and system support. Close cooperation with universities enables the company to always be at the cutting edge of technology without losing sight of the requirements of the market.

More information at: http://www.gobas.de