Businesses that ship, move, send, or receive goods on a regular basis require real-time tracking of their shipments. For this, they invest heavily in transport management solutions. One such solution is Oracle Transportation Management (OTM) Cloud. The broad and deep visibility offered by Oracle Transportation Management Cloud ensures efficient transportation planning and execution.
Oracle rolls out quarterly updates to maximize customers’ return on investment. In this blog, we’ll discuss what Oracle transportation management quarterly updates are and why they are essential to maximize your ROI. We’ll also highlight why Oracle quarterly updates require continuous testing and how Opkey’s No-Code test automation can help you with Oracle OTM Update Testing.
What are Oracle Fusion Cloud Transportation Quarterly Updates?
Oracle uses quarterly updates to deliver new features and functionalities for your Fusion Cloud Oracle Transportation Management Application. Quarterly updates also include resolutions for issues that have occurred since the last update. Some of the key features include:
- Bug fixes, security alerts, and data fixes
- New tax, legal, and regulatory updates
- Certification with new third-party products and versions
- Certification with new Oracle products
Why is Testing Critical for the Oracle Transportation Management (Fusion Cloud) System?
OTM receives new features and enhancements with each quarterly release. Since Oracle Transportation Management System (Fusion) has been configured for your unique business requirements, there’s a possibility that quarterly updates can negatively impact custom configurations.
Oracle OTM Testing validates that quarterly updates haven’t impacted your current configurations nor changed your security roles. Simply put, testing makes sure that the quarterly updates didn’t cause any unexpected behavior in your unique configuration.
Areas to Include in Your Oracle Transportation Management System Test Plan
- Integration tests confirming APIs (such as XML, REST).
- Third party external systems (such as rating, distance and service time engines).
- Key business process flows for various roles in your organization.
- Critical custom reports.
- UI tests covering users’ day-to-day activities and screens that trigger agent actions.
- Custom workflows including saved queries and direct SQL updates.
- Automatically available UI.
- New enhancements that will apply to you.
Challenges in Testing Fusion Cloud Oracle Transportation Management System
In most cases, system administrators are responsible for quarterly updates testing. As business users are already occupied with their routine tasks, they find it really difficult to test Oracle transportation management systems.
Here’s why:
Frequency of Updates
- Oracle rolls out quarterly updates for its Fusion Transportation Management system.
- Each update requires at least 2 rounds of testing - one in a non-production (test environment) and another in the production environment.
- Manual testing 8X per year can be very time consuming and challenging for business users.
What to Test
- Finding the right set of regression suites that deliver adequate risk coverage is a challenging task.
- Testers often select regression tests based on their personal experience and understanding.
- Testing too much consumes too much time and doesn’t guarantee adequate coverage. Testing too little can save time, but it can also expose your business to risks.
Challenges with Test Automation
If you bring in a code-based test automation platform, it can be challenging for business users to operate it since they’re non-technical folks.
Oracle’s transportation management application has a highly dynamic nature. Incorporating test automation can be of limited help if automation scripts break and require manual maintenance effort.
Navigating Oracle Transportation Management Cloud (Fusion) Testing Challenges with Opkey’s No-Code Test Automation
Opkey is the industry's leading Oracle OTM testing tool. By automating Fusion Cloud quarterly update testing, Opkey offers cost and time benefits to Oracle Fusion customers.
Test Guidance from Opkey
Before each update is applied to customers’ environments, Opkey runs a comprehensive series of automated tests to validate the features being released against your environment.
These tests validate:
- The health of the builds in a simulated existing customer environment.
- Successful execution of tests in a simulated new customer environment.
- End-to-end business process flows.
- Primary use-case scenarios.
- Alternate use-case scenarios.
- Oracle Cloud’s security tests.
- Reports and integration tests.
- Additional scenarios derived from design specifications.