Understanding why Oracle test automation has become a necessity for business agility
Tags: oracletestautomation
Published: 2022-11-10 12:38:52

Enterprises across the globe are embracing “cloud” to keep pace with rapidly changing market dynamics, competitive pressure, and dynamic customer requirements. Cloud ERP solutions future-proof your business with centralized and real-time access to data, scalability, flexibility, business agility, actionable insights and continuous innovation. Among some of the prominent cloud ERP vendors, Oracle Cloud has gained a significant name in the global market. Oracle works on the principle of “continuous innovation” and rolls out quarterly updates. 

Oracle’s quarterly updates come up with new features and functionalities that allow you to manage your business more efficiently and effectively. Undoubtedly, the benefits of Oracle’s quarterly updates are countless, they come at a cost. Every quarter, regression testing is recommended to ensure that new updates don’t affect your existing workflows, business processes, customizations, and critical integrations. 

Prior to making those features go-live in production, you need to understand the impact of new features and functionalities on current processes and procedures. For this, you need Oracle testing across custom reports, critical workflow approvals, and integrations with other apps. 

Each update requires at least two rounds of testing, shifting Oracle test automation from “nice to have” to “must to have”. 

- Manually testing Oracle, 8X a year isn’t a feasible solution. Oracle offers a 2 week window to test and understand the functional and technical impact of each release. This can be really daunting.
- Manually testing massive apps like Oracle can be very time consuming and laborious as testing a single scenario requires multiple data entry, navigation through screens and clicks.
- The responsibility of Oracle quarterly update testing lies on business users. However, it can be frustrating for them to perform repetitive testing as they also have other jobs to do. Their availability for testing is a big challenge.
- Manual testing is plagued with inadequate test coverage. In most of the cases, the regression suites are selected on the basis of personal choice or some guesses are made. This exposes your business to unnecessary risks. 

## Oracle test automation: Your pathway for digital transformation success

To address the inefficiencies of manual testing and to achieve speed, you need to bring in test automation. With Oracle test automation, you can easily keep pace with the frequency and breadth of Oracle quarterly release cycle. Some of the benefits of Oracle test automation are

**Speed**: Test automation speeds up testing cycles by automating some of the repetitive but necessary steps used in regression testing. This allows you to better handle frequent updates and roll out new features/ functionalities quickly. 

**Risk Coverage**: Oracle test automation tools like Opkey offer risk based coverage to ensure business continuity. Leveraging AI and ML, these tools provide you smart regression suites based on the impacted areas so that mission critical business processes should be tested first. Tools collect information to identify tests that frequently fail and offer recommendations to optimize test execution effort.

**Reduce Cost**: According to IBM, the cost of fixing defects in production is 15X as compared to fixing in the design phase. Test automation helps you incorporate continuous testing. It means that you can detect defects early, preventing them from moving into production, saving dollars for your company.

## Conclusion
If you’re an Oracle Cloud customer, test automation is a necessity for you. Many enterprises embrace agile development methodology but stick to manual testing approaches. This undermines their digital transformation initiatives. If you want to keep pace with your digital transformation initiatives, you need to transform testing. And, this can only be realized by incorporating test automation. So, bring in Oracle test automation to succeed.