Oracle Global Trade Management Cloud Testing: The Comprehensive Guide
Tags: trade, management, cloud, testing
Published: 2024-06-13 16:35:45

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If your company carries out overseas trade, you deal with issues like conducting due diligence and managing changing compliance requirements. These shifting regulatory requirements, trade agreements, and process updates are very difficult to manage with manual processes and outdated systems. This is where Cloud-based global trade management solutions come in. 

**ORACLE Global Trade Management**
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Oracle Global Trade Management Cloud (GTM) is a system that makes it easy, fast, and affordable to modernize your trade management capabilities, mitigating the risk of delays and penalties. Oracle GTM streamlines global trade operations by delivering real-time visibility into cross border trade.  

Oracle rolls out quarterly updates for its Global Trade Management Cloud (Fusion) to deliver new features and functionalities so that organizations remain compliant. However, customers using the Oracle Global Trade Management solution often find it difficult to keep up with frequency of updates. 

In this blog, we’ll spotlight why quarterly updates are critical to the Oracle GTM solution. We’ll highlight how test automation can help you with Oracle GTM update testing while maximizing your return on investment, and keeping you compliant.

**Why are Quarterly Updates Critical to Oracle Fusion Global Trade Management Solution**?

Enterprises bring in Oracle’s global trade management solution to streamline global trade operations and manage global trade regulations. Here’s how Oracle's quarterly updates help enterprises keep up with complex and ever-changing regulatory rules: 

- Oracle’s quarterly updates include new tax, legal, and regulatory updates, plus

- Security updates and data fixes

- Certification with new third-party products and versions

- Certification with new Oracle products 

- Quarterly updates also include resolutions for issues that have occurred since the last update.

Oracle's quarterly updates are critical to maintaining and optimizing your Oracle Global Management applications. Designed to enhance functionality, improve security, and ensure compliance with the latest standards, Oracle’s quarterly updates reduce the risk of non-compliance, enhance your business processes and productivity by improving the overall user experience.

**Why Should You Test Oracle Fusion Cloud Global Trade Management for Quarterly Updates**?  

Oracle GTM Cloud Applications have been configured for your unique business requirements. Oracle GTM testing validates your current configurations and ensures that the updates don’t cause any unexpected behavior in your unique configurations.

Often, Oracle GTM applications are connected with external applications to enhance critical business processes. Although Oracle thoroughly tests these updates before rolling them out, it is strongly recommended that customers further regression test their applications since Oracle cannot communicate with and test your external integration systems.

**What Should You Test After an Oracle GTM Quarterly Update**?

Oracle recommends that you test your key business processes across Oracle GTM on the new update. Testing should include a variety of functions and user roles.

**Areas to Include in Your Test Plan**:

- Integration tests confirming APIs (such as XML, REST) still work and exercise your agents and back end processes. 

- Third party external systems (such as rating, distance, and service time engines). 

- Key business process flows for various roles in your organization. 

- Critical custom reports. 

- UI tests covering users’ day-to-day activity and screens that trigger agent actions. 

- Custom workflows including saved queries and direct SQL updates. 

- Automatically available UI.

- New enhancements that will apply to you

**What Do You Need to Do to Prepare for and Complete an Oracle GTM Quarterly Update**?

Oracle GTM quarterly updates are applied to your non-production and production environments on a predefined, predictable schedule. They are mandatory, and they cannot be rescheduled. They are first applied to test cadence environments and then to production cadence environments two weeks later.

The two-week period between an update to your test and production cadence environments gives you time to confirm that your critical business flows are supported as expected after the update. 

Any unexpected issues that are identified need to be reported and resolved with Oracle Support before the scheduled date for the update to your production environment.

Use this basic timeline, and the checklists that follow it, as your guide for your Oracle GTM quarterly updates.

**Challenges in Testing Oracle GTM Cloud** 

- Each update requires at least 2 rounds of testing - one in non-production and another in production environment. It means you need 8X testing in a year which is non-viable if performed manually. 

- Furthermore, 2 weeks time to test a complex application like Oracle GTM appears very limited and manual testing is a real challenge w.r.t time.

- Finding the right set of regression suites that delivers adequate risk coverage is a challenging task since testers select regression tests based on their personal experience and understanding. This often exposes your business to unnecessary risks.

- Incorporating test automation can be of limited help if automation scripts break and require manual maintenance effort. 

- Business users play a critical role in executing regression testing of Oracle quarterly updates. Incorporating code-based test automation can be of limited help since they are non-technical folks.

**Navigating Oracle GTM (Fusion) Testing Challenges with Opkey**

Opkey is the industry's leading Oracle GTM testing automation tool. Opkey is an official Oracle partner and the top-rated app in the Oracle Cloud marketplace.

Oracle Fusion customers are saving major time and money by automating testing processes. 

Opkey has earned awards and accolades from industry analysts such as Gartner, Forrester, and G2 Crowd. Opkey is proud to provide the best test automation on the market, with offices in California, New York, Pittsburgh, India, and 250+ enterprise clients.

**Test Guidance from Opkey**

Before each update is applied to customers’ environments, Opkey runs a comprehensive series of automated tests to validate the features being released against your environment.

These tests validate:

The health of the builds in a simulated existing customer environment.
Successful execution of tests in a simulated new customer environment.

- End-to-end business process flows.

- Primary use-case scenarios.

- Alternate use-case scenarios.

- Oracle Cloud’s security tests.

- Reports and integration tests.

- Additional scenarios derived from design specifications.

This is just a glimpse of the extensive coverage offered by Opkey’s test automation platform.