Understanding Role of Zero Code Automation in Oracle Testing

Oracle offers comprehensive suite of SaaS applications – from enterprise resource planning, supply chain management, and human capital management, helping organizations to stay agile and react swiftly to the changes brought by market dynamics. Oracle Cloud apps are designed on the principle of continuous innovation. As its commitment towards its customers, Oracle rolls out quarterly updates consisting of new functionalities and customer enhancements. Apart from this, Oracle also rolls out vertex updates, infrastructure updates, monthly maintenance packs, security patches, and exception updates. Many innovative enterprises see this faster update cycle as a key advantage of Oracle Cloud, however, some customers are really struggling to keep pace with the frequency and depth of Oracle updates.

In this article, we’ll discuss why should you bother about Oracle Cloud updates and how can you keep pace with ever evolving Oracle updates using zero code test automation.

Why should you bother about Oracle Cloud Quarterly Updates and Patches?

Although Oracle rolls out updates after testing and issues are getting rarer as the product evolves yet you cannot simply deploy these into production without testing. Oracle tests updates in its own environment and not in your specific environment, making testing a mandatory thing. Since Oracle updates and maintenance packs that offer bug fixes have the potential to affect a variety of functionalities, you need to find out how that updates and bug fix are going to impact your existing processes and procedures.

Some of the downstream problems that could have major implications for operational efficiency are

• Customers may have customized some of the configurations or reports as per their unique business needs. There is a possibility that custom reports, key workflow approvals or critical customizations may break during updates or patching.
• Enterprises often use different sets of enterprise apps to facilitate their business processes. For instance, they can use Oracle Financials for financial operations and Salesforce CRM for customer engagement. Many enterprises use productivity tools such as HRMS, payroll services, or Microsoft Office 365 along with Oracle Cloud apps. During updates, there is a possibility that critical integrations with other applications may break.
• In Oracle, workflows can be customized and user-privileges can be assigned on “role-based” model. With updates, these user-privileges tend to change. So, validation of user-privileges and security roles needs to be validated. This can only be achieves with security testing.

Why manual test automation is not a viable solution in case of Oracle?

To understand why manual testing isn’t a viable solution, you need to understand the Oracle release cycle.

• Oracle rolls out updates on quarterly basis.With each update, you need to perform at least two rounds of testing – one in test environment and second in the production environment.
• It means that Oracle requires upgrading and regression testing at least 8 times/year.
• Furthermore, Oracle offers two week window to test the updates. After two weeks, the updates are forced into production. This short duration is a concern for business analysts and end users for regression testing.
• Repetitive Oracle testing is time consuming and frustrating for business users and IT leaders trying to balance the needs of the business.

Embrace zero code test automation to stay ahead of the game

Introducing test automation will help you efficiently handle Oracle Cloud updates. Test automation eliminates labour-intensive manual processes that are more prone to human errors, inaccuracies, and less test coverage.The risk of defect leakage to the production environment is also more in manual testing. With test automation, you can address these issues, speed up test execution, and ensure adequate test coverage.

Let’s see how your Oracle test automation should look-like

• Zero-code: Zero-code test automation is no-more a record and play engine. It now comes with advance technology such as natural language processing to help business users create test cases without requiring any coding knowledge. In most cases, it reduces the test script creation time and effort by over 70%.
• Self-healing:Oracle apps are highly dynamic and test engineers often struggle to maintain scripts after every update. Oracle test automation frameworks with self-healing capabilities automatically accommodate changes due to dynamic elements and heals the test scripts without human intervention. It helps in significantly reducing testing efforts and boosting productivity.
• Test recommendations: What you should test and what you shouldn’t is a very challenging question. Over-testing consumes time and under-testing expose your business to unnecessary risks. To address these challenges, you need test automation framework with risk-based assessment. The framework that identifies risks by performing test gap analysis and provides you impacted areas for testing, every time an update is rolled out.