Why You Need to Test Before and During Your Oracle EBS to Cloud Migration

March 14, 2022
Sohaib Zaidi

According to HubSpot, nearly 70% of organizations opt for cloud-based ERP systems over on-premise software due to affordability, ease of installation, and minimal IT infrastructure. Oracle EBS customers are no exception to this trend, especially because Oracle is soon ending its premium support for EBS customers. As such, a record number of organizations migrated from Oracle EBS to Oracle Cloud in 2021.

Despite more and more businesses moving to the cloud, ERP migration is a notoriously tough task. According to Oracle, more than 80% of migration projects run over time and/or over budget. Cost overruns average 30%, while time overruns average 41%.

Why do so many migrations go over time and/or over budget? Inefficient testing processes.

According to a 2021 survey by Gitlab DevSecOps, testing was found to be the workflow that was most likely to cause delays, among organizations going through an ERP migration.

And failure to test early and often can prove extremely expensive: According to IBM, it costs 6X more to fix a bug found during the implementation phase than to fix one identified during the design phase. Additionally, if a bug is found in the testing phase–right before production—then fixing it costs 15X more than it would in the design phase.

The lesson here is clear: organizations should test early and often during their migrations to ensure their projects are complete on time, and under-budget.

Shift-left: An iterative testing approach

Shift-left testing refers to pushing tests to the earlier stages of a migration project, and this approach greatly helps organizations avoid cost overruns and project delays by identifying and resolving bugs as early as possible in the development cycle. The Shift-left approach not only emphasizes testing early, but also makes testing central to the development cycle.

With a traditional waterfall Dev approach, testing is performed at the end of a development activity, rather than baked into the development process. This means that the earlier the bugs are introduced, the larger their potential ripple effects, and the more complex, time-consuming, and expensive they are to resolve.

Applying Shift-Left Testing Approach in EBS to Oracle Cloud Migrations

The migration to Oracle Cloud can be greatly de-risked by applying a Shift-left testing approach. With this approach, organizations perform testing pre-migration, during-migration, and post-migration, as described earlier, enabling them to find and resolve bugs early in the process. This reduces risk by ensuring that small issues do not compound into large-scale problems.

Another major benefit of the Shift-left approach is that it enables organizations to automate their testing. Automated testing offers some critical advantages over manual testing, including:

• Less human error
• Increased test coverage (multiple tests can be conducted at the same time)
• Cost savings

And if you’re interested in learning more about why you should automate your testing, read our post about 7 reasons to automate your Oracle testing.

Here are some ways to implement a Shift-left testing approach to your Oracle migration:

• Incorporate test automation into your current Oracle EBS instance
  Start early by incorporating test automation in your Oracle EBS instance. By testing in your EBS instance, iterative testing will become more efficient and will require less effort over time, as early testing allows you to organically build more coverage as your technology stack evolves around your digital core transition.

• Conduct an Impact Assessment as part of evaluating Oracle EBS migration
  Executing an impact assessment, which shows As-Is vs. To-Be processes, helps you understand the configuration variance between your current EBS and future Cloud environment. This assessment will help highlight areas to focus testing on, and make sure you don’t waste time testing the wrong things.

• Break up your migration into smaller phases
  As a general rule of thumb, you should migrate to Oracle Cloud in phases. This approach helps ensures that functional modules continue to work as intended during the migration, and ensures that bugs can be found earlier. Additionally, by breaking your migration up into phases, your team will have shorter, more manageable deadlines to achieve, which tends to keep the migration on-time.

• Take a step back to examine your current business processes
  Your migration to Oracle Cloud provides you the rare opportunity to review your existing business processes, as you have to map out your EBS workflows to Oracle Cloud. Historically, organizations had to rely on expensive consultants and lengthy meetings with business employees to uncover existing business processes and suggest new ones. As you can imagine, this approach was not very effective, as it’s largely guesswork.

A Shift-left testing approach, that incorporates a test automation tool with process & configuration mining, can greatly reduce the cost and effort of this discovery process. It can accurately show you what workflows your employees are actually using, so you can ensure that they’re mapped out in your new Oracle Cloud environment. It also highlights inefficiencies in your workflows.

• Look for ways to get your business units involved
  Testing should not be an IT-only operation. Your Oracle test automation framework should allow business users, who actually interact with Oracle on a daily basis, to get involved with testing. After all, they know their business processes better than anyone else.

Accelerate your EBS to Oracle Cloud Migration with Opkey

Opkey has helped some of the world’s largest companies migrate from Oracle EBS to Oracle Cloud with a Shift-left testing approach. Here’s a bit about how we did it:

• Migration Impact Assessment: Opkey autonomously discovers your current processes and highlights business-critical functions to ensure they are tested first.
• Test Discovery: Opkey immediately discovers your historical test scripts from your EBS environment and maps it to your new cloud environment.
• Visualization of as-is and to-be business processes: Opkey provides detailed impact report of As-Is and To-Be business processes to ensure nothing breaks during the migration.
• Test Accelerator: Opkey has a library of over 5,000+ test cases that can be applied to customers in minutes, ensuring they have complete test coverage.
• End-to-end Testing: Opkey alerts you whenever middleware, integrations, and other 3rd party applications are at risk from a change in your Oracle environment.

Sohaib Zaidi

Technical Content Writer