Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

Quick summary: SAP Enterprise Performance Testing (EPT) by Tricentis now integrates with SAP Cloud ALM, so teams can create, run, and track performance tests in the same hub as the rest of their S/4HANA transformation. For teams managing SAP transformations, most major workstreams are visible in Cloud ALM, but performance testing has long been an exception. It has lived in a separate tool, forcing teams to treat it as a separate workflow that’s often left to the end of a project.

Mike Dillon is a Global Platform Leader at IBM. While deeply technical and experienced in enterprise architecture, he is not a traditional hands-on software developer. Yet this spring, Dillon paired his domain expertise with IBM Bob, IBM’s AI coding assistant, to engineer his first full-scale enterprise application: WatsonAuditX. Designed to automate the documentation required for complex SAP audits, the app addresses a familiar operational roadblock.

In September, Anthropic’s CEO argued that AI companies should deliberately slow the pace at which they improve their models, because advances are outrunning researchers’ ability to understand and control them. Sam Altman endorsed the idea within hours, and other leaders of frontier AI labs quickly echoed him. For QE teams, the pace problem is already here. AI-generated change is arriving faster than anyone can review, and it isn’t arriving clean.

Oracle’s Fusion Agentic Applications represent a new class of enterprise software. They contain coordinated teams of outcome-driven, proactive AI agents that are engineered to execute business processes across finance, HR, supply chain, and customer experience. For folks who work in those departments, these agents may streamline some of their daily work and help uplevel employees. For testers, they bring a measure of ambiguity. In general, you know how humans use these applications.

By now everyone is aware of the limitations inherent in generative AI and the AI agents that use it to complete their tasks, and the challenges involved in getting them enterprise quality. If you are planning to incorporate AI agents into your enterprise IT architecture, how are you planning to validate their quality and accuracy?

For the first time ever, artificial intelligence has topped NASCIO’s annual ranking of state CIO priorities, ending cybersecurity’s 12-year reign at number one. It’s easy to see why: public agencies – like their private sector counterparts – see real potential in AI to modernize operations, accelerate service delivery, and help lean teams do more with fewer resources.

Every AI headline this year is about speed: code shipping faster, test scripts generating in seconds, releases compressing from weeks to days. What gets less attention is what happens to quality when everything around it accelerates and the way you manage testing doesn’t.

Software runs mission delivery in the public sector. As agencies modernize and systems grow more connected, the cost of a failed release climbs. The result can be service disruptions, compliance gaps, and loss of public trust. Automated testing is central to managing that risk, but it raises a practical question: which approach is right? Two options come up often: robotic process automation (RPA) and model-based testing (MBT). Both support automation, but they were built for very different purposes.

Picture a large-scale grocery and retail chain launching its first online storefront. The setup is complicated: a single online order must travel through an SAP eCommerce platform, multiple payment and loyalty systems, before disappearing into back-end SAP supply chain and ERP apps. The complexity of merging the online and offline business is like a “digital tsunami.” For many SAP enterprises, this sounds familiar.

Quick summary: Performance teams can generate tests in minutes, but the analysis still takes hours. Agentic Performance Testing in NeoLoad uses domain-specialized AI agents to deliver a finished analysis from a single request, so engineers can start with the conclusions, rather than the raw data. Performance testing answers a critical question in the quality engineering lifecycle: will this hold up when real people use it, under real conditions, at real volume?