Why is Automated Oracle Cloud Testing Crucial for Today’s Enterprises

As enterprises migrate to Oracle Cloud, they look to capitalize on the multiple benefits of Oracle’s SaaS solutions to run their businesses. While organizations seek to take advantage of the rapid pace of enhancements and fixes delivered, they must also acknowledge the challenges presented by the frequent and regular updates coming from Oracle. Changes, enhancements, defect fixes that used to take months or years to implement, can now be pushed to customers in days or weeks as part of Oracles Quarterly Patch or Ad-Hoc updates.

Consequently, as the speed of change from Oracle for has increased, the business risk has increased as well. As many Oracle customers have come to find out, the increased risk of established business breaking down with each quarterly update is the flip side of the “frequent release” coin. As anyone in business can attest to, when existing business processes breakdown, teams cannot function, productivity declines and money is lost.

Given this new testing burden, manual testing of Oracles Quarterly Updates is no longer sufficient for today’s agile enterprises- it’s expensive, time consuming and does not provide adequate test coverage given the compressed testing timelines. As a result, companies are increasingly looking to leverage Automated Testing to reduce risk and keep up with the new pace of change from Oracle.

By automating the testing of Oracle Cloud updates, enterprises now can broaden test coverage, complete testing within a shorter time frame, and provide stakeholders the confidence that their most critical processes will not fail after each patch release. The cherry on top? It’s more cost-effective and timelier than manual testing.

Pace of Change:

with ever-changing market dynamics, competitive pressure and business turbulence, enterprises must adapt and update their business process flows regularly. With each process adjustment, or a new process, it must be tested to keep business disruptions at a minimum. Automated testing is the most efficient way to test these changes and to ensure related processes are not impacted.

Each Implementation is Unique:

Oracle Cloud solutions are customizable, each implementation largely unique to each enterprise. As a result, each Oracle Cloud quarterly update means there’s a high possibility that customizations could break and disrupt established business processes. Through automating testing, organizations can ensure critical customizations are intact from release to release.

Systems Integration:

Like most enterprise applications today, Oracle SaaS solutions rarely operate in a vacuum within a business’s application ecosystem. In most cases, Oracle SaaS solutions integrate with a host third party systems as well as other productivity tools like Office 365. Given the elevated chance that quarterly updates could impact these critical integrations, every organization advised validate their critical integrations with each update. As a result, any Test Automation Platform under consideration must have the ability to validate End-To-End business flows that supports testing these integrations.

Role-based Security:

Oracle SaaS solutions utilized a role-based security model and as such, each Oracle Cloud quarterly update brings the very real possibility that security roles will change. Organizations would be remiss if they did not test and validate security and user privileges with each quarterly patch update. Given the sheer number of Function and Data security privileges it is next to impossible for organizations to test this manually- automated testing solves this problem.