Approach to Design a Module from Scratch in ABAP

There may be some situations where you might need to develop the entire module in ABAP from scratch, This might be needed to address a Customer specific process which may not fit into any of the SAP Modules.

There are several aspects you might need to consider/Concentrate to fulfil the requirements. You might need to develop the entire module in module. The following are the critical items that you might need to concentrate. This might applicable for all the custom development. Some of the items 


Requirement Gathering

1. Basic Requirement - Discuss and Decide on the basic functionality that should be offered to the user.
2. Interfacing Requirements with other modules - Decide on how to communicate with other module
3. Reporting Requirement -  Discuss and decide on all the reports that you might need to offer to the Users
4. Output Requirements - Decide on the output requirement for the module
5. Other Customer specific Requirement 

After collecting all the requirements from the user, You can categorise requirements into Must have Requirement and nice to have requirement. based on that you can always talk to client and convince them on the nice to have item. As a consultants, We should not develop all the items that user wants, we need to analyse the Business and explain the user/Client about the pros and cons of functionality that the are asking for and suggest the best fit solution for their problem.

Especially if the client is new to SAP you will have tough time in convincing them.

Designing 

1. Decide the data elements that should be used in the module
2. Table Structure Design 
3. Screen Design
4. Decide on the interfaces 
5. Design the Reports Structures
6. Design the output
7. Design of Workflows <if needed>
8. Design of Configurable Items

Other important functionality that will make your module in line with the SAP modules are as follows

1. Number range objects
2. Authorization Objects
3. Change History
4. Links to Master data
5. Search helps for custom fields
6. Data base locks

We will look into each of above items in coming days.

Things to Remember while Programming in ABAP

Introduction to ABAP