ABAP - Skills of the future (Community Call)

Before Christmas there was another SAP Community Call on the subject of skills of the future and what skills a modern ABAP developer should know in the next few years. As mentioned in an older article, we have already talked about some new topics of the future that describe the all-round ABAP developer.

Community Call

If you are interested in all community calls from the past year, there is an overview from SAP for you. At this point we link you again to the call from the last time, which we want to go into more detail today. If you want to see it yourself, then here is the video:

Topics

The 10 topics that you should focus on in the next few years in order to get to know and understand them in detail.

• ABAP Syntax (Object-oriented ABAP, New ABAP)
• Core Data Services
• HANA-specific Features (SQL Expressions, CTEs and AMDP)
• Tools (ADT, BAS, ATC)
• Programming models (BOPF, RAP)
• Interface technologies (OData, Gateway)
• Fiori Elements
• ENhancement from S/4 HANA (Enhancement Framework, Spots, BAdI, In App Extensibility, Side by Side Extension)
• Open Source (abapGit, Open Source Projects)
• Continuous Integration (Clean ABAP, Refactoring, ABAP Unit)

You will not have to know and understand every topic in detail. General knowledge is also important here in order to understand what the system is doing approximately at this point and how it processes the data. You should be able to analyze the system from a UI5 app to the database in order to understand the entire process and explain the data flows as a developer.

Interface

More and more systems, applications and companies are making public APIs (interfaces) available in the form of REST or OData. Fiori applications only work with these type of interfaces in order to access the data in a SAP system and use functions. They are fully standardized and have a wide range of features to use properly.

Therefore, this topic should also be viewed with an appropriate focus, as it is important in many ways and you should understand how these interfaces work. Especially when it comes to data acquisition and authentication. Also what resources you have available in the system to provide an OData service (SEGW, CDS, BOPF, RAP, etc.).

Help

We won't leave you alone with these topics and we will also support you with our blog, in which we publish articles on the individual topics. We have already published several series on the following topics:

• New ABAP
• ADT as the IDE of the future
• Programming model BOPF

We are currently working on series around the topic of ABAP Unit and how you can check your applications easily and fully automatically in order to save you the continuous re-tests and quickly implement new features.

Conclusion

As in our first article on the topic, the variety of other technologies and specializations will continue to grow in SAP over the next few years, so that you as a developer should position yourself a little broader. But there will still be classic SAP backend developers for the next few years and many companies will be looking for them.