Help requested: Question: Enforcing Coding Standards with GitHub Copilot in SAP ABAP (Eclipse)

[xbalajipge]

First, apologies for using this repository to ask a question that may be unrelated. I wasn’t able to find a reliable place to ask this, so I’m hoping someone here might be able to point me in the right direction.

I’m supporting an SAP ABAP development team that uses Eclipse as their IDE. I’m the GitHub Copilot administrator, but I don’t have hands-on experience with SAP ABAP. The team asked how organizational coding standards can be enforced or guided using GitHub Copilot.

I shared guidance on using custom Copilot instructions (for example, via a .github folder), but it appears that ABAP projects don’t have a .github directory in their object structure. I also haven’t been able to find documentation on how (or if) Copilot custom instructions can be applied in this context.

Could someone please point me to:

• The correct way to configure or scope Copilot instructions for SAP ABAP projects, or
• Relevant documentation, examples, or communities where this question would be better addressed?

My goal is to help the SAP development team successfully adopt GitHub Copilot while adhering to their coding standards.

Thanks very much for your time, and again, apologies if this issue is out of scope for the repository.

[larshp]

Hi,
I recommend helping the ABAP developers to move towards a more standardized and industry standard development process. Like first step could be to do structured code reviews on github, that way the developers will collaborate and share opinions and knowledge, which is more important than copilot IMHO. But, the side effect will be that anything copilot is easy to setup, with normal tools, with feedback given in the pull request like all other continuous integration. Another side effect is having backups of the code.

https://github.com/abapGit/abapGit can be used to push and pull code
https://github.com/abaplint/abaplint for static analysis

[jelliottp]

Also, while copilot in eclipse does not allow for the typical project copilot instructions like you mentioned, it does have a place for workspace instructions in the settings. I find this works fairly well for guiding copilot to follow certain patterns and standards.

I would also think about this a little differently, copilot should not be the sole tool used to enforce standards. As @larshp mentioned, use github if possible, which gives access to industry standard processes. The difficulty here is that typically this is still separate from your deployment path.

You can also build enforcement in your SAP pipeline using ATC checks. See code-pal and abapOpenChecks as tools available to do this.