Oracle Cloud Quarterly Updates: An Essential Testing Guide
Oracle Cloud Quarterly Updates: An Essential Testing Guide
February 25, 2022
Sohaib Zaidi
If you’re clicked into this guide, chances are you’re struggling with Oracle Cloud ERP quarterly updates (just like thousands of other Oracle customers). Since Oracle Cloud quarterly releases can affect nearly every department of your enterprise, you can’t afford to ignore the problems that arise around them. This guide is meant for both business and technical employees who play any role in these quarterly updates. Now let’s jump in.
Why Should You Care About Oracle Cloud Updates?
One, they’re essential to the health of your business. Two, they’re only getting faster and more complicated. As more enterprises migrate to Oracle Cloud, they reap the benefits of new and streamlined features that are constantly evolving. Changes that used to take months or even years to implement can now be pushed to Oracle customers in days, allowing organizations to take quick advantage of new features and functionalities.
The world of SaaS can sometimes appear isolated, locked in insider jargon and confusing metrics. What’s the bottom line on the business front? For sales? Regardless of apparent distinctions, these other aspects of your business positively depend on the health of your ERP ecosystem. It’s hard to make new sales when the enrollment system is down. It’s impossible to please investors if you’re rocked by data security breaches. And it’s difficult to stay insulated against shifting economic headwinds if your environment is breaking down.
Unfortunately, as the speed of change for Oracle customers has increased, business risk has increased too. That’s because with each quarterly and ad-hoc update, old business processes are subject to breaking. When existing business processes break, teams cannot properly function and productivity declines sharply. And this drop in productivity is costly. According to Gartner, one hour of application downtime costs the average business $300,000.
Additionally, when critical Oracle Cloud apps like HCM, Finance, or Supply Chain aren’t working as intended, customer and employee relationships are put at risk. Just a few months ago, the Gaston County School system’s Oracle Finance experienced a major bug, and they weren’t able to pay their teachers for months.
With the importance of Oracle quarterly testing in mind, let’s consider some specific areas of concern for different types of employees in your organization.
As a business manager (such as Finance Lead or HR Lead), you should be considering:
- How to best keep pace with Oracle’s quarterly updates cycles to make the most of new features
- How to minimize the burden of testing Oracle apps 8 times/year
- How to ensure business continuity after each Oracle Cloud update and no application downtime
- How to ensure testing is done in the most cost-effective manner
As a business user (such as HR Analyst or Finance Analyst), you should be considering:
- How to easily create audited reports for compliance purposes
- How to efficiently coordinate between your team and the IT team, as both are typically needed to create and maintain test scripts
- How to keep your team engaged, since manual testing is a repetitive, monotonous task that’s often rife with human error
As a QA/ IT/Oracle Cloud Application manager, you should be considering:
- How new features and bug fixes will impact current processes and procedures
- How to identify the exact scope of what you should be testing
- How to ensure nothing critical goes wrong
How should you be addressing these concerns?
Test automation is the foundation of a healthy Oracle update routine. Though we’re slightly biased, we think you should be automating your Oracle Fusion quarterly update testing. Manual testing of Oracle Cloud apps isn’t viable because it’s time consuming, error-prone, and almost never guarantees optimal test coverage. With manual testing, teams either test too much, wasting time and money, or don’t test enough, leaving their apps exposed to risk.
With an automated testing approach, the repetitive — but necessary — tasks in regression & UAT testing can be streamlined and improved. Furthermore, intelligent test automation eliminates the guesswork from what to test, and test execution, ensuring business continuity post update.
How Intelligent Automated Testing Addresses Specific Employee Concerns
Business manager (such as Finance Lead or HR Lead)
- Oracle test automation decreases testing timelines by 80%. By having to spend less time testing, your team can focus on how to take advantage of Oracle’s new features.
- By providing optimal % test coverage, you get assurance that your critical Oracle applications won’t experience downtime.
- Testing costs are reduced by more than 50%, compared to manual testing.
- An Oracle test automation platform largely eliminates the need for employees to spend hours testing each quarter. This enables your employees to focus on tasks that really matter.
Business user (such as HR analyst or Finance analyst)
- Oracle test automation enables these employees to create and maintain test scripts without the help of technical resources.
- By greatly reducing test cycle times, test automation frees users from tedious work.
- Test automation streamlines your reporting processes and ensures each test is documented for compliance purposes.
QA/ IT/ Oracle Cloud Application manager
- Pre-built, automated Oracle Cloud tests will save your team hours of time creating tests.
- Intelligent test automation can clearly show you the impact of upcoming changes, and identify areas that need the most testing.
- Intelligent test automation eliminates the issues posed by over-testing and under-testing. You’ll know that you’re testing exactly what you need to.
- No-Code test automation reduces the burden of test script maintenance. Test automation platforms like Opkey have self-healing capabilities that autonomously fix breakages to test scripts that occur with updates, without requiring human intervention.
Conclusion
Oracle test automation will not only keep you ahead in the game through continuous innovation, but also protect your business from risks that might occur from application downtime. Test automation directly solves issues that quarterly testing poses to all employees in your organization. A recent client cut their Oracle update window to 3 days. That could be you, too.
Sohaib Zaidi
Technical Content Writer
Sohaib is a technology enthusiast and a passionate writer with vast experience in technical niches like IoT, AI, Cloud Computing, ERP, SaaS Software & Business Intelligence. Sohaib loves to create compelling and communicative sales copies that create great impact on the minds of the readers.