Everything You Need to Know about Oracle Functional Testing and Its Associated Challenges

According to Forrester, most legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) investments fail in the digital era. They move too slowly, lack intelligence, and are too complex for the realities and customer expectations of the digital world. A new breed of ERP is rising which is agile, adaptive and AI- based. Oracle has been one such ERP which has paved its way to the digital transformation required by enterprises today.

Oracle has become much more than an ERP system with offerings in the cloud, so while it has taken on more end-to-end business processes, it doesn’t come without its challenges.

In fact, Oracle comes with frequent patches and updates to ensure that its applications meet the changing demands that face enterprises.

This comes as a challenge for companies that use Oracle’s software as they have to maintain the quality of their business applications integrity and agility so frequent testing is critical to ensure business processes continue to run as intended.

This blog will explore how automating Oracle functional testing is the best way to address business challenges that include managing time-to-market pressure, mitigating business risks, reducing costs and saving time and resources.

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The Current Testing Environment

Change can happen from anywhere in your Oracle environment. It can be a new release, a patch, a simple data or code change, or even a name change in a field. These changes often go into production without adequate testing because of either time or resource constraints, ultimately causing major financial and reputation loss for a company.

For example, if you are manually testing your Oracle application to ensure if newly configured features are working properly and that established features have not regressed, it may cause significant issues during production even after investing months and thousands of man-hours in testing.

How to Apply Best Practices to Functional Testing Oracle

Testing Oracle Cloud applications’ frequent releases, continuous updates, and multiple integrations is quite a challenging task. The more that changes, the higher the risk of breakage, which makes automated testing business critical.

Oracle is a long-established ERP, with some enterprises using it for their core business processes for over 30 years, which can require old Java versions or tie to old browser versions of Internet Explorer.

This makes Oracle Functional testing quite challenging. Some of the challenges faced while Functional testing Oracle are:

Automated Best Practices Are Not Followed

Automated testing is difficult to set up and can easily break. Oracle has lots of nonstandard custom components that can’t be recognized easily by Open source and commercial tools. Because of this, heavy customization in automation script is required and that needs deep technical expertise and breaks easy automation.

With every update, Oracle changes object properties which tend to break the existing automation scripts and to maintain these scripts, significant effort is required. It also doesn’t capture all scenarios thereby requiring manual involvement that has high costs and risks associated with it.

While automating functional testing is the way forward, today, mot businesses aren’t equipped to fully automate their testing.

Continuous Updates

Oracle Cloud is updated quarterly or even weekly, with over a thousand changes made each time. No amount of manual testing can completely eliminate the risks associated with basic business processes given the frequency of updates, the regularity of changes, and the core functionality that is affected.

End-to-End Integrations

Oracle applications are interconnected and distributed among multiple end-to-end business processes, like APIs, web UIs, mobile, web services, ESBs, mainframes, and other packaged applications. End-to-end integration testing is required to ensure these business processes continue working even after any update or configuration change. The challenges of running end-to-end tests can slow down your release process and increase the risk of undetected defects disrupting business.

Compressed release cycles

Oracle Cloud updates are frequent and affect a wide range of features and processes. Not only that, but these updates are scheduled on fixed dates allowing very little time for testing. Manual testing has limited coverage and speed in this environment, leaving only automated functional testing as the solution to these complex scenarios.

Inadequate Test Coverage

One of the biggest challenges in Oracle Cloud testing is insufficient test coverage. Many functional / non-functional attributes get added, updated or removed with each update. There is a limited number of test scripts that can be run manually, which limits the overall test coverage. To cover the test adequately, an automated testing approach must be employed.

Resource Intensive

Relying on a manual resource to build and maintain your Oracle test framework can be labor intensive given the variety of test scenarios you need to cover. If you push your testing into an automation framework you will need to task a tester or developer to write and maintain your automation scripts which will pull their time from their existing daily tasks, and likely result in a lower quality testing framework.

Is Your Automated Testing Framework allowing your businesses to leverage the full potential of automation?

Code-based test automation frameworks require the tester to code or the developer to spend their time testing. Either way, precious resource time and effort are wasted. Due to these reasons code-based automation frameworks become unreliable as they require a lot of maintenance and skilled resources.

To keep pace with changing market requirements, organizations adapt to changing conditions.

Codeless automation is the way forward as it allows testers to automate, whether they have a technical or non-technical background.

The learning curve becomes much shorter with no dependence on resources learning how to code.

How can Opkey Help?

Opkey is the industry’s leading codeless test automation tool with a sophisticated understanding of the Oracle technology stack that solves the most critical needs of Oracle functional testing.

With Opkey’s pre-built test accelerator you could reuse assets you already built with no additional work needed.

You can model your business processes once and reuse them, which speeds up your automation flows, and also helps you reduce your maintenance burdens - a major time-saver in the long run. What else does Opkey provide?

1. 70% Reduced Risks – by covering 70% more test scenarios and testing more data combinations, we ensure that defect leakage is zero and business continuity is ensured. Fast set up –
2. System up and running in two days
3. Very low involvement from business teams needed during set up – three sessions that are two hours each
4. Fast Update Test – Patch/Update Certification in three days flat
5. Saving 60 days of effort per employee per cycle at the minimum

Insufficient test coverage for your quarterly Oracle Cloud update certification can leave your business exposed with the risk of extended downtime.