Whether you’re in the middle of your implementation or already using Oracle Cloud, understanding the role of testing is essential. The Oracle Cloud environment is complicated–with hundreds of unique processes and integrations for each customer–and every update can expose organizations to immense business process risk.

Adopting a continuous test automation framework provides consistency and peace of mind with each Oracle update. At a high level, continuous testing provides immediate feedback on application changes–allowing your team to focus on what really matters–  and saves testing time over the long run by eliminating the need for manual tasks. Read this blog to  learn more about the different types of Oracle updates, and how automated testing is the only way to keep up with them.

Types of Updates & Associated Challenges

Oracle provides the following updates on a regular schedule:

Keeping up with all of these is quite the struggle for most businesses, as each one requires unique testing workflows.

Here are some ways that continuous, automated testing can help:

• Ensuring End-To-End Integrations are Properly Tested

Oracle applications are highly distributed and interconnected to multiple end-to-end business processes. For example, one change in Oracle may affect a SalesForce business process, which in turn affects a separate collect-to-pay process.

For organizations that have these complex, interconnected software systems, End-to-End testing is essential so that they can see how one change in Oracle affects the rest of their technologies. Most manual testing techniques fail because they only work in one environment–they do not see changes through the whole process. Automated testing platforms, on the other hand, can test changes from start to finish, ensuring that business processes that span multiple technologies are properly tested with each Oracle update.

• Compressed release cycles

Oracle Cloud updates are very frequent and affect a wide range of functionalities.  Moreover, they must be applied on a scheduled date that is unchangeable. Whereas manual testing cannot scale up with these frequent and complex ERP updates, automated testing takes less than 20% the time of manual testing. As such, organizations that implement continuous, automated testing can achieve shorter release cycles and push out updates faster, so employees can benefit sooner.

• Continuous Updates

Oracle cloud is updated quarterly, and with each update, more than a thousand changes are pushed onto each customer. Continuous testing ensures that bugs and other issues are detected early–enabling organizations to efficiently navigate hurdles before they present issues to business users. No amount of manual testing can completely eliminate risk from core business processes given the frequency of updates; Test  automation is the only way to achieve the required business risk coverage with the necessary speed.

• Inadequate Test Coverage

One of the biggest challenges faced in Oracle Cloud testing is inadequate test coverage. Organizations simply do not know what they need to test, and as a result, they either test too much–wasting money–or test too little–exposing their business to unnecessary risk. To find out how much testing your applications actually need, a comprehensive continuous testing approach–that uses machine learning to constantly improve–must be employed.

Factors to Consider When Choosing an Automated Testing Tool for your Oracle Updates: ?

• How quickly can a tool certify an update is adequately tested?
• Is the automation Platform independent and easy to integrate with other third party tools?
• Does the tool provides an End to end Change management visibility?
• Does the tool provided solutions across range of areas in Oracle Cloud like Integration, Security validation and Data integrity?
• Does the tool integrate with other ERP solutions?

How Opkey can help automate Oracle updates

Opkey is the world’s  #1 Continuous Testing platform that helps Oracle Cloud Customers by dramatically reducing testing time by over 80%. Opkey comes standard with more than 2,000 pre-built test cases for Oracle, allowing customers to reach 100% test coverage in just days.  With AI-powered Change impact analysis and Self-healing test scripts, Opkey helps customers prioritize where they need to spend their time testing with each Oracle update. This significantly decreases test maintenance costs, and ensures that customers are fully prepared when they implement Oracle updates.