Organizations across the globe are using Oracle Cloud Fusion Applications to optimize their business processes. Not only Oracle Apps help manage governance, risk and compliance through data access control, business transaction audit, and regulatory compliance certification but also give business owners rich information, better insight into the business, and the ability to correlate data. To support its customers and manage their business seamlessly, Oracle continuously rolls out new features.

In this blog, we’ll discuss how Oracle keeps its Fusion applications robust and why updates are necessary to manage governance, risk and compliance. We’ll also highlight a strategy that customers should follow to keep their Oracle Fusion Apps up to date.

What are Oracle Fusion Updates?

To deliver new features and functionalities to its customers, Oracle rolls out quarterly updates. Apart from this, Oracle updates also include resolutions for issues that occurred since the last update. Given below is the summarized list of things that updates include:

• Fixes, security alerts, data fixes, and critical patch updates (security patches)

• New tax, legal, and regulatory updates

• New upgrade scripts

• Certification with new Oracle products

Oracle Cloud Quarterly updates are applied to non-production (test) environment first and the schedule for the same is

• February-May-August-November

• March-June-September-December

• April-July-October-January

Updates are mandatory and cannot be rescheduled. After two weeks, they are applied to production cadence environments. So, a customer gets a two-week period to test whether or not his critical business flows are working as expected after the update. Any unexpected issues can be reported to the Oracle.

Why do Oracle customers need to test their applications post quarterly updates?

Customers configure Oracle Cloud Applications as per their unique business requirements. Whenever updates are rolled out, testing needs to be performed to ensure that the update doesn’t cause some unexpected behavior to their unique configuration. Oracle recommends testing critical business processes on the arrival of new updates including functions and user roles.

What’s the problem in testing Oracle Updates?

• Oracle rolls out quarterly updates. Each update requires at least two rounds of testing – one in the test environment and another in the production environment. In a year, customers need to test at least 8X.

• Manual testing of Oracle updates can be very challenging as it consumes a lot of time and effort.

• Even if you have manpower to perform manual testing, there is always a risk associated with inadequate coverage. Manual testing doesn’t guarantee adequate coverage and business continuity.

Navigating Oracle Updates Testing Challenges with Test Automation

Test automation is the only logical way to address these challenges. By incorporating automated testing, users can automate some of the repetitive but necessary steps. This saves time and effort. Rather than getting engaged in testing for whole year, QA teams get the chance to focus on productive work. However, test automation for Oracle has its own set of challenges.

• Regression testing of Oracle Apps is often performed by business users. Since they are non-technical folks, a code-based test automation platform cannot be the ideal solution for them.

• Oracle Apps are highly dynamic in nature. A slight change in the UI during updates can break test automation scripts. Manually fixing automation scripts can be a challenging task.

• Often, Oracle Apps are integrated with third-party enterprise apps. Finding the test automation solution that supports the entire technology stack is a challenging task.

No-Code Test Automation for Oracle Apps

No-Code test automation is the most appropriate solution to address the above-mentioned problems. No-Code test automation platforms like Opkey are easy to use as no prior knowledge of programming is required in operating them.

Furthermore, there are numerous test automation platforms available in the market that come with self-healing capabilities. One such platform is Opkey that doesn’t require human intervention in fixing automation scripts. Opkey’s built-in intelligence automatically heals up the test scripts so that they can be reused again and again in regression testing.

Since Opkey supports 12+ ERPs and 150+ enterprise applications, it offers end-to-end coverage. Opkey’s predictive intelligence also ensures that the most at risk business processes are tested first during Oracle updates.