In the current Agile and DevOps era, the pace of software updates has accelerated significantly, and Oracle is no stranger to this trend. Like many other software vendors, Oracle releases quarterly updates to introduce new features, functionalities, and enhancements for its customers.

This blog will delve into the significance of Oracle Quarterly Updates, explaining what they entail and why they are crucial for businesses. Additionally, we will explore the importance of conducting regression testing on these updates to ensure uninterrupted business operations.

What is Oracle Quarterly Updates?

Every quarter, Oracle rolls out new updates to expand functionality, resolve bugs, and update security. These are known as Oracle’s Quarterly Updates. They may include the following:

• Security Patches

• Bug fixes and data fixes

• New tax, legal, and regulatory updates

• New upgrade scripts

• Certification with new third-party products and versions

• Certification with new Oracle products

When is a Quarterly Update Applied?

Your cohort determines when the quarterly update is applied to your pods:

• Cohort A: February-May-August-November

• Cohort B: March-June-September-December

• Cohort C: April-July-October-January

Since Oracle’s quarterly updates have the potential to impact existing configurations, security roles, critical integrations, and custom reports, it is recommended that customers should understand the impact of the upcoming new release on their current environment. This is where quarterly update testing comes in.

Your configurations, extensions, and data are automatically preserved in the test environment prior to Oracle quarterly releases. The updates are initially applied in the test environment, providing you with a two-week testing window for regression testing. After this period, the updates are automatically implemented in the production environment.

Challenges in Oracle’s Regression Testing

Oracle rolls out updates four times a year. Every update requires at least two rounds of testing – one in the test environment and the other in the production environment.

Since Oracle is a massive application, testing it eight times a year can be very challenging if performed manually.

A single test scenario requires multiple clicks and data entry, making it time consuming.

Even if you’ve resources to manually test Oracle Applications, there is always a risk associated with test coverage. Testers often select regression test suite based on experience and guesses since there is no logical way to find out test cases. This can expose your business to unwanted risks.

Addressing Oracle’s Regression Testing with Test Automation

Test automation is the only logical way to speed up the testing process while ensuring adequate risk coverage. By automating some repetitive but essential steps, QA teams can easily save a lot of time and effort. Test automation platforms like Opkey provide risk-based coverage.

It means that test automation platforms recommend regression test suite based on the impacted business processes. So, QA teams don’t need to spend too much time testing non-vital areas. Since test cases are recommended as per impacted areas, QA teams need to test processes that can disrupt business. However, Oracle is a complex application and not every test automation platform can solve the problem. So, you need to keep the following things in mind while selecting a tool.

No-Code Automation: Quarterly updates are often tested by non-technical business users. Selecting a code-based tool will create problems. So, it is recommended that you should bring in a no-code test automation platform that requires minimal technical knowledge to operate.

Self-healing Capabilities: Oracle Applications use dynamic elements. A test automation platform with static test scripts will fail due to dynamic elements. Always opt for a test automation platform that comes with self-healing capabilities so that test scripts can be healed without requiring human intervention.

End-to-end Coverage: Oracle applications hardly operate as standalone applications. Always opt for a test automation platform that supports multiple technologies. Whenever quarterly updates are rolled out, end-to-end testing is required so critical integrations don’t break.

Conclusion

If you’re an Oracle customer, you need to understand that updates are part of continuous innovation. To keep up with continuous updates, you need to bring in test automation. The tool should be no-code and deliver end-to-end coverage.