SAP developers face education debt, user group warns

Many enterprises are investing tens of millions in modernizing their SAP landscapes, but are often underestimating a crucial factor for success, the training of their own developers, according to the German-Speaking SAP User Group, DSAG.

The user association urges CIOs to treat the continuing education of SAP developers not as a voluntary training measure but as a strategic investment program in a new report on upskilling [PDF, in German]. Well-trained developers are essential for building stable, maintainable in-house projects without accumulating technical debt, but without continuing education during the upgrade to S/4HANA, the potential of the new technologies will remain untapped, it warned.

Outdated expertise becomes a project risk

As the authors explain, while many ABAP developers have decades of experience with SAP R/3 or ECC and possess extensive process knowledge, development paradigms have fundamentally changed with S/4HANA, Clean Core, and ABAP Cloud.

In the long term, this threatens to lead to poor architectural decisions, time-consuming workarounds, and in-house developments that will need to be maintained with every release, according to DSAG. Many business consultants, too, are still relying too heavily on classic GUI transactions and not taking modern Fiori technologies sufficiently into account.

The result is what the SAP user group refers to as “skills debt.” This debt remains invisible at first but later becomes apparent in the form of longer projects, rising maintenance costs, and a growing dependence on external service providers.

Skill building must start before the project

The DSAG authors view the timing of training as particularly critical. Those who wait until an ongoing S/4HANA migration project is underway to begin building expertise significantly increase the project risk. A lack of knowledge about CDS, RAP, or Fiori leads to architectural decisions that must later be corrected at great expense. At the same time, the necessary learning effort can hardly be managed alongside day-to-day business operations.

But even after the migration is complete, SAP developers must continue their training, according to DSAG. The authors warn that anyone who continues to work as they did on ECC will miss out on the opportunities offered by current SAP technologies — even if everything still works technically. At the same time, they can immediately apply what they’ve learned, which helps solidify their new knowledge.

AI no replacement for developer expertise

While AI tools can generate and explain code, this requires that developers be able to evaluate the results from a technical perspective, and according to DSAG the same applies to development in the SAP environment: “Only those who understand what constitutes good SAP code can use AI as an accelerator,” the authors write. Otherwise, AI acts as a risk amplifier and, in the worst case, merely accelerates the accumulation of technical debt.

The prerequisites for successful AI deployment are solid software engineering knowledge, automated testing, and an understanding of modern SAP development.

DSAG’s five recommendations

DSAG recommends that CIOs firmly integrate continuing education into their transformation strategy with five measures:

• defining mandatory learning paths for different roles, such as ABAP, CAP, or integration developers, as well as business consultants,
• providing suitable sandbox and test environments,
• mandatorily including training time in capacity planning,
• coordinating training schedules with migration and modernization projects, and
• using existing DSAG guidelines as a reference framework for development.