In this era of cutthroat competition, enterprises across the globe are looking to migrate to cloud to stay ahead in the game. Cloud offers several benefits like low operating costs, real-time access to corporate data, business continuity assurance, and commitment towards innovation. Among some of the available cloud ERP solutions, Oracle has gained a significant reputation in the global market among its peers.
One of the most amazing features of Oracle Cloud is its commitment towards continuous innovation. Oracle rolls out quarterly updates, consisting of new functionality and customer enhancements, enabling you to efficiently and effectively manage your business. The benefits of these updates are huge. But enterprises that are still leveraging manual testing approaches are struggling to keep pace with these updates.
In this post, we’ll discuss why manual testing approaches can act as a bottleneck and why there is a need for Oracle test automation and how to do it right.
Why is Oracle Cloud testing important?
Whether you’re a business user, system integrator or application owner, you need to understand what’s new each quarter. You need to perform regression testing every quarter to ensure that Oracle’s quarterly updates haven’t inadvertently introduced bugs or have negatively impacted your system’s performance or user experience.
Although Oracle’s internal teams test updates before roll out, it has recommended to perform regression testing all your critical business processes since you might have customized your instance or have integrated it with third-party apps. Prior to deploying updates in production, you need to test critical reports, key workflow approvals, and critical integrations with other applications to keep business continuity intact.
Challenges with Oracle’s manual testing approaches:
#1: Costly & Labor Intensive
Oracle quarterly updates require two rounds of regression testing – one in test environment and other in production. The updates are first deployed in testing and two weeks later, they’re automatically deployed in production. Manual testing can be labor intensive and business users find it frustrating as you need to test Oracle Cloud apps at least 8X a year.
#2: Time Consuming
Manual testing of scenarios can be very time-consuming since a single scenario requires numerous clicks, data entry and navigation through multiple screens during testing.
#3: Inadequate Coverage
Manual testing is often plagued with inadequate coverage. The reason being test engineers select regression tests by making guesses or they create test cases based on the guesses of how end users are interacting with the Oracle applications.
What is Oracle test automation?
Oracle test automation is all about replacing manual testing by automated testing so that frequent updates along with patching activities and business process improvements can be handled efficiently. Oracle test automation ensures that test cases are executed seamlessly with adequate test coverage and verifying that the system works as expected post updates.
In nutshell, we can say that Oracle Cloud test automation allows:
- quick, continuous, and reusable test execution.
- zero-defect delivery
- minimum manual efforts, reduced costs, and effortless maintenance
- Improved security and compliance
Challenges with Oracle test automation
- Business users (BU) are the ones who test Oracle Cloud apps. BUs are not programmers. So, they find it really tough to create test scripts with script-based test automation tools.
- Oracle Cloud apps are highly dynamic and feature dynamic elements that don’t have fixed attributes like ID, Name, XPath, or CSS. Test automation tools like Selenium that use locators to control elements on the screen cannot fit technically as hard coding locators require lots of effort and still lead to flaky tests.
- Due to dynamic nature of applications, a slight change in the UI i.e. i.e. new screens, buttons, user flows can lead to test scripts failure. So, test automation scripts maintenance can be a tedious job in case updates are occurring quarterly.
How to do Oracle test automation right?
Since, test automation is about reducing timelines, efforts, and cost, scripted automation platforms cannot solve your purpose. You need a platform that supports
- Zero Code Testing: Pick the test automation platform that allows business users to create test cases without requiring any additional skills like knowledge of programming or coding.
- Self-healing: Opt for a test automation framework that automatically identifies changes in the object property (Name, ID, Xpath, CSS etc.) and autonomously fix them dynamically without requiring human efforts.
- Smart Regression: Select the test automation platform that recommends test cases based on the risks to ensure that impacted areas are tested first.
Opkey – Oracle test automation platform
Opkey is industry’s leading codeless Oracle test automation platform that allows business users including business analysts, functional consultants, manual users, and stakeholders to participate in testing with minimum training. Opkey’s AI-powered engines autonomously identify changes in your transactions, configurations, and custom screens and recommend test cases to ensure adequate coverage. Opkey alleviates the “maintenance burden” with its Self-healing capability. It detects changes in the scripts and autonomously heals all your impacted test cases, saving you hours of manual effort.
