6 Tips to Sail Through Your Next Oracle Cloud Update
Published: 2023-05-18 13:58:15

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Most of the time, Oracle Cloud makes your life easier. It has streamlined financial processes, the most advanced HR data compilation sets on the market, and all of your overall business needs in one app. 

But then quarterly patch updates come around. Four times a year, Oracle gets complicated. 

These releases provide new features, functions, and security upgrades across your ecosystem. This means you need to test every single one of those changes to ensure they don’t disrupt your business. 

And if you’ve tested these updates before, you know that there’s just a tight 2 week window to test them all. There’s a better way. A way we’ve developed from working with hundreds of enterprises streamline these quarterly updates while saving time, money, and effort in the process. Updates that took weeks can be certified in just 3 days with test automation. 

Ready to learn how? 

Here are 6 actionable tips from the minds of industry experts who know Oracle Cloud inside and out.  


Your Roadmap to a Smooth Oracle Cloud Patch Update
1. Review an advisory document to understand the incoming changes. 
You need to know what changes are coming so that you can plan your testing strategy accordingly. This also ensures that business continuity will not be affected. Opkey wades through hundreds of pages of notes from Oracle to bring you the most relevant information about the update. You can read the 23B advisory document here.  

2. PRE-UPDATE: Identify the scope of testing by taking a baseline of the previous version.
Without mapping your pre-update ecosystem, you’ll be blind to areas of change. 

It’s essential to determine which business processes will be most affected by the update. The amount of customization across your Oracle modules determine the breadth of update testing, as well as the number and types of new features your organization is looking to incorporate with the new update. 

3. PRE-UPDATE. Make sure test scenarios/scripts are updated and check test data readiness.
Review the materials and update test plans. Save custom reports at least two days before the update to avoid overwriting them.

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For information specific to Oracle’s latest release, 23B, click here. 
4. POST-UPDATE: review release impacts and conduct a risk assessment. 
Conduct a risk assessment that highlights the most high-risk areas of your applications based on the impacts of the release. You should plan to focus testing around these high-risk areas first, to ensure no critical business processes break. 

5. TEST!
Types of Tests:

Security Role Validation : Access to certain data and app functions should only be given to users with the appropriate roles and privileges. Most enterprises have application roles that provide employees with tiered access to application functions and data. After quarterly updates, the inherited roles and security might get changed, so it’s vital to test them. 
Sanity Tests : Oracle sanity testing ensures  basic functionalities still work after the new version is deployed. The objective of sanity testing is to ensure that Oracle’s new version is compatible with existing software, and to identify any critical issues that might have been introduced during the development process.
End-to-End Regression Testing : End-to-end testing involves testing an entire business process from beginning to end, including all integrations and dependencies with other systems. Because most Oracle environments are heavily integrated with other applications and technologies, it’s vital that APIs and connections are tested because even if the Oracle application continues to work as intended after an update, it’s possible–and even likely—that one of its integrations will have broken. 
End-to-End Integration Tests : Integration testing checks the communication between Oracle Cloud and other interconnected APIs, ERPs, or third-party apps. These are the areas that should drive your priority tests: To ensure accurate integrations, check and validate both outbound and inbound integrations, including any business processes that are automatically executed with pre-populated values. 
Reports, Data, and Integrity Validation Tests : Test your reports to validate that formatting changes aren’t negatively affected due to the update. Check which columns have been added, updated, or dropped from the update. If so, test cases must be edited to incorporate this information. Review whether process parameters have remained the same or changed. 
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Learn more about the high-level trends shaping ERP test automation - we surveyed over 300 IT leaders in our 2022 State of ERP Report. 
6. Log service requests with Oracle. 
If something was working before an update, but isn't working after, log a service request. Make sure to note that the issue didn't exist before the update. It's best to file a separate service request for each issue. Include necessary screenshots, reports, and proof of the issue so that Oracle can get back to you as quickly as possible. 

Following clear-cut protocols like these tips prevents expensive and embarrassing ERP failures. (See real-life examples of those failures here.) 

So how exactly can you accomplish the tips above in record time? You’ll need a modern tool with AI-powered test generation that skips the hefty workload of doing things manually. Opkey’s no-code testing platform reduces manual testing efforts by an average of 80% and gives anyone on your team the ability to generate and automate tests with a single click. Additionally, with Opkey’s Impact Analysis, your organization can know which changes will affect which aspects of your environment.   

Opkey customers are reducing their certification windows from weeks to just 3 days.  

We also provide 5,000+ pre-built test cases for Oracle Cloud that can be applied to your ecosystem out-of-the-box. Check out how we accomplished this for Standard Solar. 

Schedule tests, auto-generate reports, raise tickets, flag issues, and collaborate across departments, all on the same platform. The days of confusing Excel sheets and late night phone calls are over!