SAP Code Decommissioning

SAP‘s powerful customizability allows you to extend its functionality to meet your business’
unique requirements. Changing requirements and evolving standards and technologies can make
it less relevant and secure. smartShift’s automated safe code decomissioning is the best way to
remove burdensome technical debt to reduce risk and untether your developers.

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The Challenge of Legacy ABAP Code

Maintainability/Cost

Unused code increases the code base in scope of any upgrade (e.g. S/4HANA)
Unused code increases maintenance cost and slows down response times

Knowledge Silos

Much knowledge of custom code is institutional, and people may be unwilling to openly share it
Developers who created custom code may no longer be available

Technical Debt

40-60% of the custom code in an SAP system may be unused
Code utilization may not be tracked to support decommissioning decisions
Lack of understanding of utilization wastes time and money when unused code is investigated or remediated

Security

Unused code is often older code that is more likely to be out-of-compliance with security best practices
Decommissioned custom code is secure custom code

Why use smartShift’s ABAP Code Decommissioning Solution?

Unused code increases the code base in scope for any upgrade, migration or conversion project, increasing the complexity, risk and cost in all phases. EHP and SPS upgrades, HANA migrations, and S/4HANA conversions are made much more difficult they need to be. Removing unused code before your upcoming SAP modernization project will allow you to focus on your strategic custom code, and help you avoid being burdened by accumulated technical debt.

Unused code is additional code that needs to be analyzed and maintained. 40% to 60% of software maintenance efforts may be devoted to analyzing and understanding existing code, before determining where useful changes can be made. If obsolete code exists, programmers must spend time understanding it, which increases your maintenance efforts and costs.

Similarly, unused code negatively impacts your response time for production issues or the implementation of needed enhancement to meet business and operational needs and provide competitive differentiation. Also, regression testing scenarios are typically designed to cover all code, so the unused code adds unnecessary time, cost and complexity there as well.

Another very important reason to remove unused code from your SAP Systems is security. Older code is likely to have been developed based on standards that evolve over time. Because of this, that code often relies on security loopholes which translate to real security vulnerabilities that leave you at risk of a breach.

smartShift provides a risk-averse and safe approach to decommission custom code from SAP repositories. Depending on the type (ST03N, UPL, SCMON) and amount (retention period) of usage data available, smartShift can implement different approaches for code decommissioning (1 step, 2 step with tracking, etc.) Any decommissioned code is always available to restore, and we provide the mechanisms to know when it’s necessary and get it back into production quickly and easily.

A Safe and Thorough ABAP Code Decommissioning Solution

Analysis

smartShift uses and enhances standard SAP reports and data to create detailed and relevant analyses of your code utilization.

Decommissioning

Safe decommissioning comments out code and inserts system messages that alert users if deactivated code is invoked. Once the choice is made to remove objects, they are archived for potential reactivation.

Scoping

smartShift presents analysis results and works with you to determine the scope for decomissioning or further tracking

Upgrade

Analyze code custom code for upgrade, Unicode, HANA, S/4HANA, cloud readiness, code standardization and modernization issues

Tracking

Our Intelligent Automation can track suspected unused custom objects by inserting low-impact code snippets that log usage and report back.

Continuous Modernization^SM

Ongoing code modernization, optimization and deactivation can be integrated into our smartOne managed services to align with the evolution of your systems and requirements.

Trusted by Many of the World’s Largest SAP Customers

smartShift’s automation has been used to modernize over 1,000 SAP systems, analyzing and converting 2 billion+ lines of code with an error rate of less than 0.1%.