SAP announced prominently at their prime autumn event TechEd 2024 the SAP Build Code ABAP environments offering. The announcements stats that this brings ABAP to SAP Build 🔗. SAP Build is the integrated go-to place for SAP developers that want to create modern SAP solutions. For cloud or on-premise solutions. So far, this was only possible for non-ABAP based solutions, as SAP Build integrated several developer tools and features like CAP, BAS, Process Automation, but nothing ABAP related. This changed with the announced addition of ABAP to the SAP Build portfolio.

But what is this tightly integrated ABAP feature? Is it now possible to develop ABAP RAP applications directly from within the browser? Is the ABAP editor and all the wizard, tooling, frameworks accessible for developers from within BAS? Looking at the announcements and the presentation shared, you might get the impression that ABAP is tightly integrated into BUILD. There is the Unified SAP Build Lobby which gives direct access not only to CAP, Fiori and MDK flavored BAS (or in SAP terms: Full-stack Application, SAP Fiori Application, Mobile Application), but now also to ABAP Cloud Full-Stack Application.

Looking closer takes a little bit away from that magic feeling. Using the ABAP integration into SAP Build comes down to: ABAP developer using ABAP development tools for Eclipse. That’s ADT for Eclipse, or short ADT. That’s a desktop application. It’s Eclipse – the desktop application – with the ADT plugins. That’s the preferred tooling for ABAP developers for S/4HANA development since … like forever.

SAP Build Code ABAP environments is now what? It is ADT for Eclipse. With a nice tile in the Unified SAP Build lobby. I guess the tile is what makes ADT tightly integrated into SAP Build. In that case the integration comes down to a link that points to Eclipse.

Does this make the SAP Build with ABAP integration the most hyped link ever in the SAP world? I do not remember another example where calling a desktop application was so much talked about. So, I guess: yes. What makes this “integration” interesting from a developer and customer perspective is the added AI features to ADT.

From top of my head, there are so many other

AI driven ABAP development. Let the AI generate unit tests for me. Let the AI explain code for me. Let the AI help the developer go through wizards 🔗. This can save valuable time and help make the resulting apps not only delivered faster, but with a slightly higher quality.

Is this now SAP Build only? Seems not, as the AI features for ADT are in the ABAP AI SDK powered by ISLM and Joule. I guess the question that determines how to get access to the ABAP AI SDK is: what is more important: SAP Build customers or customers using AI for ABAP development? How to use it seems not be part of TechEd. This is rather something for Q1 2025. Let’s wait how the tightly integrated SAP Build ABAP ADT will work when developers have to open a Citrix desktop and start ADT from there.

Fusion development

The term fusion teams or fusion development caught my attention. SAP is remembering that software is not written only by a single person – full-stack or citizen developer – but rather by teams. I hope that SAP understands that a fusion team is not only composed by developers.

The slide I found gives me not much hope that SAP sees fusion teams as a diverse group. Not diverse in the sense of technical skills. Diverse in the various skills needed to deliver business applications: technical, functional, processes, business. What I hope for is that SAP fills the term fusion teams inside Build with the glue that enables teams to work efficiently. First things that come to my mind that SAP should include:

• Start from business process: show where improvements can add value. What is maybe missing and gather input from end users.
• Include business users to provide input, data, test cases and other business process related information that helps understanding the problem to be solved.
• Data modelling in Build and allow to use the very same model definition (CDS) for CAP and RAP. This is currently not possible, but why should a customer be punished for the lack of standardization of CDS between programming models?
• Automated test generation with tight end user involvement.
• Gather feedback directly from the app to improve other flavors. Be it a mobile app, web app or the API version of the underlying service.
• Enable transparent solution by enabling collection of traces and other measures in a transparent way through all involved components.
• Make the development multi app: mobile, web, analytics. All integrated into one place.

This is on top of the current available collection of developer tools for SAP Build. The idea should be to enable teams to create solutions.