Organizations across the globe have embraced Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications to eliminate data silos. Oracle Applications combine enterprise data to offer unified data view to eliminate silos while giving real-time access to it to decision makers. With real-time access to data and actionable insights, organizations can make well-informed decisions. As its commitment towards its innovation, Oracle rolls out frequent updates so that organizations can optimize their businesses. In this blog, we will highlight details related to Oracle Updates.

What are Oracle Updates?

Every quarter, Oracle rolls out updates for its Fusion Cloud applications. It means that customers get new features every three months. These new features help customers efficiently manage their business. Out of all, few features are delivered Enabled so that end users can immediately consume them. While other features are delivered Disabled which means customers need to take action to make these features available. 

What can a user expect from an Oracle Quarterly Update?

To deliver new features and functionality to its Fusion Cloud applications, Oracle rolls out quarterly updates. First, these updates are applied to customers’ non-production environments on a predictable schedule. Since this is fixed and mandatory, they cannot be rescheduled. Once these updates are applied to test environments, customers are given two weeks’ time to test these updates.

By testing these updates, customers can validate that their critical business flows are working as expected after the update. If any issue arises, it can be reported to Oracle Support. After two weeks’ time, Oracle updates are rolled out to the production environment. 

Why is testing critical to Oracle Updates?

Customers have configured and customized their Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications as per their unique business requirements. Often, they have enhanced their business processes by integrating Fusion applications with other apps. Testing ensures that updates don’t cause unexpected behavior to your unique configuration.

Oracle suggests that customers should consider following areas while testing

• Integration testing including REST and XML APIs
• Third-party applications
• Custom reports and roles
• UI tests for user experience
• New enhancements

Why is test automation the key to success?

Oracle rolls out quarterly updates that require testing. Applications like Oracle Fusion are complex to test manually. The reason being these updates are often tested by business users who have their daily tasks. Moreover, what to test is also a big question as Fusion applications are complex and selecting a regression suite to test updates can be a challenging task. Testing every area of the application can be very time-consuming in a scenario when you need to test an app every three months.

Test automation can perfectly address such problems. With automation, repetitive but necessary steps can be executed automatically with the help of scripts. This saves a lot of time. Apart from this, if you bring test automation platforms like Opkey, they can offer several advantages.

• One of the biggest challenges in Oracle test automation is test script maintenance. Opkey’s test automation platform comes with self-healing capabilities that autonomously embrace changes to keep scripts functional.
• Leveraging AI, Opkey recommends test cases based on the impact and risk. This helps significantly in achieving coverage that could not be possible with manual testing.
• Opkey’s no code test automation can be used with minimal effort. Business users don’t need any programming knowledge to use Opkey’s test automation platform to create test scripts. 
• You don’t need to start from scratch while using Opkey’s test automation platform as it comes with prebuilt test accelerators that can help you test. 

Conclusion

Oracle Updates are critical for your business success as they offer you a competitive edge. Missing these updates will also lead to compliance and security issues. However, testing them manually is a time-consuming task and can be considered as a significant bottleneck. Test automation is the most appropriate solution to keep pace with your digital transformation initiative. So, you should consider bringing in test automation if you are struggling with the frequency of Oracle update testing.