Central Quality Checking with the ATC

With the ABAP Test Cockpit (ATC), you can do central quality checking. The advantages:

With central quality checking you can verify the quality of programs from your developers in an ABAP consolidation system or test/quality system.

You can perform mass regression testing to ensure that changes or new developments are not causing unexpected problems.

In a test or consolidation system, all of the components of an ABAP project or set of projects come together, perhaps coming from more than one development system. New or changed code comes together with your existing code set. You can test for unexpected interactions across your code set. Such a system is also more like your production systems than development systems are; it is therefore more suitable for quality checking.

Central quality checking should of course be accompanied by intensive local ATC quality checking in development systems. Developers should catch most problems with their own ATC testing. But central quality checking allows formal control and management of quality checking, besides allowing mass regression testing.

In central quality checking:

You run the ATC regularly (daily or weekly, for example) for ABAP repository objects in an ATC master system, such as your ABAP consolidation system.
You publish the ATC findings to developers in your development systems. There, they are shown as the currently active ATC result.
Your developers correct any problems found by the ATC. If a problem cannot be fixed, then a developer may request an exemption for the relevant finding.

Such exemptions and the status of ATC findings are managed and persisted on the master system. All users have the same view of the central ATC run. Status and exemptions are carried over from one central ATC result to the next.