Gobas GmbH develops concise diagrams for

SAP ABAP OO developments

Plug-in from Gobas GmbH provides an overview of your own SAP projects with UML diagrams

Q.TRANS/4EA, developed for the SAP community by Gobas GmbH, is a plug-in for Enterprise Architect that can be used with S/4 HANA and SAP R/3. For the first time, it enables the creation of a clear UML diagram for any SAP ABAP OO development at the click of a mouse. This makes it possible to maintain an overview of your own SAP development projects at all times. It utilises the interface developed by SAP for Eclipse.

Vienna/Braunschweig – Gobas GmbH is an association of various IT companies from the Braunschweig and Hanover area specialising in SAP development and consulting as well as .NET development. Due to the increasing use of model-driven software development in the SAP environment, the company began developing Gobas q.trans around five years ago. With the new Q.TRANS/4EA plug-in for SAP ABAP OO, genuine integration into Enterprise Architect has now been achieved without any media discontinuity and with a significant reduction in the technology stack.

Maintenance costs during the term of an SAP project: model-driven development
significantly reduces maintenance costs (source: Gobas)

Markus Abel, Managing Director of Gobas (Source: Gobas)

Previously, Enterprise Architect and the SAP system were not connected directly, but via 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 don’t 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 mouse click, the resulting model is immediately available and can be analysed as required and further processed with the full range of Enterprise Architect functions,’ explains Managing Director Markus Abel from Gobas.

Always keep an overview

As IT is being used intensively in more and more areas of the company today, it is not easy to maintain an overview of the emerging IT landscapes. Of course, this also applies to SAP development projects operated by the respective company itself and their interdependencies.

‘As SAP consultants, we see in our day-to-day work how the challenges in companies are growing. We therefore pursued the idea of making customer-specific ABAP coding easier to understand and control. Our product Q.TRANS/4EA not only makes it possible to use UML models to show the interdependencies between applications, but also to actively support users in optimising them,’ emphasises Abel.

In addition to the UML models, proven methods for quality assessment (metrics) of the software created are also used for the analysis. In the previous version of the product, these metrics had to be imported in a time-consuming process. Now this is elegantly solved visually: the diagrams created in Enterprise Architect can be analysed more quickly and purposefully according to various metrics by colouring them.

Types of costs in the course of an SAP project: Software costs money over its entire life cycle, because in addition to the pure development costs, there are considerable maintenance costs during the utilisation phase (source: Gobas)

 

With around 1,000,000 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 delighted that Gobas has succeeded in creating a true integration between Enterprise Architect and SAP. This enables companies that use SAP to quickly gain an overview of the system and IT networking. Thanks to the clear graphical presentation, the maintenance and development of SAP systems can be significantly accelerated. We are convinced that Gobas will meet with broad interest with this solution, as the ongoing further development of IT is a central key to economic success,’ emphasises Hans Bartmann, Sales Manager of SparxSystems Europe.

Hans Bartmann, Sales Manager of SparxSystems Europe

Understanding and expanding existing applications

In the new plug-in version, Q.TRANS/4EA offers a wide range of options for analysing the SAP software you have created yourself, displayed 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. A prerequisite for the interaction between 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 where a correction or function extension needs to be inserted and what effects this will have on the entire design, even in the face of an unmanageable number of development objects. With the ‘Reverse engineering’ function, the architecture of an ABAP OO application can be displayed in the modelling tool with just a few mouse clicks. This provides a graphical UML model, i.e. the building instructions for the respective application.

The overview gained in this way considerably reduces the effort required to correct a malfunction or create a function extension. At the same time, the risk of bad decisions and undesirable developments is reduced.

‘Statistics show that around half of the development time for software applications is spent on troubleshooting and analysing dependencies. This alone makes the benefits of our solution clearly recognisable, as it significantly shortens these time-consuming procedures,’ concludes Abel.

Modelling also has another advantage: the software documentation that previously had to be maintained manually in SAP is created semi-automatically in the modelling tool and also prepared accordingly.

The highlights of the Enterprise Architect PlugIn Q.TRANS/4EA

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Short development times

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Reduced maintenance costs

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Clean and secure documentation

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Reliable evaluation of technical source code quality using metrics

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Direct access from Enterprise Architect to the SAP systems

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Modern user interfaces

About Gobas GmbH

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

About SparxSystems Europe 

Sparx Systems Pty Ltd (Australia) was founded in 1996 and is the manufacturer of Enterprise Architect, a globally successful UML modelling platform. Enterprise Architect is used for designing and building software systems, business process modelling and modelling any process or system. Enterprise Architect is recognised by over 1 million users for its performance at an unbeatable price. Enterprise Architect is an easy-to-understand, team-based modelling environment that helps companies to analyse, design and create systems that can be accurately understood and documented. With the help of this tool, companies are enabled to collect and visualise the often highly dispersed knowledge of teams and departments in a centralised manner.

SparxSystems Software Europe was set up in 2004 to provide the best possible Enterprise Architect service to the many customers in their language and time zone, supporting the entire German-speaking region with licence acquisition, training and consulting. SparxSystems Software Europe is a business unit of the Lieber.Group.