How AI Can Reduce ABAP Technical Debt
ERP Today, Wednesday, October 21st, 2026
SAP Mentor Paul Hardy says AI can take on the refactoring and unit testing developers skip, but humans must stay responsible for the code.
Heidelberg Materials ABAP developer and SAP Mentor Paul Hardy wrote a deliberately terrible ABAP program and ran it through several AI tools, and he will present the results at Mastering SAP Collaborate in Sydney.
Hardy says refactoring and unit tests are the first work dropped under deadline pressure, which is how custom SAP code becomes technical debt.
AI can draft a full set of unit tests in seconds, and although they contain errors, fixing them takes about an hour, compared with doubling development time by writing tests by hand.
"You can't take away a job that's not being done," he says, rejecting vendor claims that AI replaces programmers and insisting developers must understand what AI generates.