Founded on the ethos of perpetual evolution, Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP revolutionizes traditional business practices by automating manual processes, empowering enterprises to stay ahead in today’s competitive landscape. To swiftly adapt to ever-changing market dynamics, Oracle regularly releases automatic updates known as Oracle Cloud ERP Quarterly Updates.
In this article, we’ll underscore the significance of these updates for organizations, identify the potential hurdles they may encounter during implementation, and provide strategies to effectively navigate and overcome these challenges.
Why Oracle Updates are Critical for Business?
Oracle Cloud ERP Quarterly Updates consist of
- New features and functionalities that help organizations efficiently handle their business.
- Bug fixes, security enhancements, 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
Since all these things are critical to keeping you compliant, you cannot ignore them. If you’re an Oracle ERP user, you need to embrace these updates. However, often, customers find it challenging to keep up with the Oracle quarterly updates.
Here’s Why:
- Quarterly updates mean you’ll receive them four times a year. Every time an update is rolled out, it’s first applied in the test environment. You need to perform regression testing to ensure nothing breaks. You only get two weeks to do this.
- After two weeks, updates are rolled out in production. Here, you need to perform regression testing again to find out whether your custom workflows, critical integrations, and custom reports are working fine.
- Regression testing 8X a year can be very daunting if performed manually. Furthermore, a two-week testing window is also very short for testing a complex ERP application.
- Manual regression testing of Oracle quarterly updates cannot ensure adequate coverage since it is based on the basic understanding and experience of testers. However, in the software testing world, testing more isn’t often considered as adequate risk coverage.
Test automation is considered the best solution to the above-mentioned problems. By automating repetitive but necessary tasks, testers can save time and effort. However, there’s a catch. Not every test automation tool fits into Oracle testing.
Why Can’t Every Test Automation Solve The Purpose?
- Oracle is a highly dynamic application. If you select a test automation platform that creates static scripts, there are chances that even a slight change in the UI can lead to breaking of test scripts.
- Oracle applications hardly operate as a standalone application. They often integrate with third-party applications like HCM, 3PL, etc. It is often difficult to find a test automation platform that supports the entire technology stack.
- At times, organizations bring in cade-based test automation platforms. Creation and maintenance of test scripts become a challenge in that case.
- Regression testing is often performed by system administrators along with business users. Since business users are non-technical folks, they find it difficult to operate a code-based test automation platform.
No-code test automation is the best way to navigate through quarterly updates. Test automation platforms like Opkey are easy to operate since they are no-code. Business users can easily create test automation scripts with a simple drag-and-drop interface. Moreover, these platforms come with risk-based coverage and self-healing scripts. This means that impacted test cases heal automatically without requiring human intervention. Risk-based coverage ensures that the impacted business processes are tested first. So, the business processes that are at high risk are tested first to ensure that business continuity remains intact.
Conclusion
As stated above, Oracle applications are built on the principle of continuous innovation. To get the most out of your investment, you need to incorporate the updates at the right time. Since continuous integration and deployment is the part of the application maintenance, you need to incorporate test automation. It helps you seamlessly navigate through updates without risking your business.
