As an Oracle application manager you must be wondering
- Why continuous testing is a non-negotiable if you want to get the most from Oracle’s fast-evolving cloud applications?
- How test automation can ensure this while enabling you to focus on higher value tasks?
Continuous testing for Oracle Cloud apps isn’t a luxury but a necessity. Enterprises across the globe are embracing Oracle Cloud apps due to low operating costs, high scalability, flexibility and commitment towards innovation. Since Oracle Cloud Apps are a true SaaS solution, the vendor wants to keep every client on the same version. Oracle rolls out quarterly updates so that businesses can be managed efficiently. Oracle’s quarterly updates mean that within the interval of 90 days customers will get the latest best in class features and functions that will further streamline their business processes.
However, enterprises that are still using manual testing methods are struggling to keep pace with the frequency of Oracle updates. The reason is quite simple. Every quarterly update needs at least 2X testing i.e. one in testing environment and another in production. And all this needs to be done in the interval of 2 weeks. First, the updates are rolled out in non-production environments. After two weeks, updates are applied to the production. The schedule cannot be changed or canceled.
Since Oracle Cloud updates have the potential to break your existing workflows, customizations, and critical integrations, you need to regressively test them. It is recommended that you should perform regression testing of key business processes, custom reports, critical integrations with other applications, custom workflows (journal, invoice, PO approval, etc.), available UI and process new features that will apply to you.
Why manual testing of Oracle Cloud quarterly updates isn’t a viable solution?
- Quarterly updates mean innovation 4 times a year. So, you need to test Oracle’s quarterly updates 8 times a year which can be time consuming and laborious for business users.
- Since manual testing approaches rely heavily on humans, there might be chances that test engineers select a regression suite based on their experience, leading to inadequate risk coverage.
- Oracle apps are massive and a single scenario may require multiple clicks, data entry at numerous points and navigation through multiple screens that may take hours.
- Oracle Cloud apps can be integrated with numerous productivity apps. Testing an ecosystem of apps manually can be very time consuming and cumbersome.
How test automation can address these challenges?
Test automation alleviates the pain of business users by automating some of the repetitive tasks, helping customers to better handle frequent application changes. Test automation platforms like Opkey mines your existing test cases and offers 1-click automation to ensure that automation script creation does not consume too much of time.
Another benefit that test automation platforms offer is smart regression. Enterprises don’t need to rely heavily on humans while picking up smoke/ regression suites. Opkey leverages AI to provide a comparative analysis of the old and updated instance. Opkey’s AI powered engines identify changes across the configurations, transactions and custom screens and recommend test cases based on the highlighted impact so that you test only what is required. Not only this saves a lot of time but also ensures adequate test coverage.
Opkey’s test data management solution uses test mining technology to identify data patterns and density function of features to provide you synthetic data and autonomously feed relevant data sets into configurations so that you don’t have to waste time in data creation and entry.
Since Oracle Cloud Apps are highly dynamic with elements not having fixed attributes, many test automation frameworks suffer test script maintenance. Opkey addresses this challenge with its AI enabled self-healing capability that autonomously fix test scripts without human intervention.