There is no iota of doubt that Oracle Cloud has earned laudable recognition across the globe. Enterprises irrespective of industry are using Oracle Cloud apps to streamline their operations. Apart from scalability, flexibility, and real-time access to corporate data, Oracle Cloud offers its customers the opportunity to innovate with its continuous innovation model. As its commitment towards innovation, Oracle rolls out new updates every quarter. It means that customers will receive new features and customer enhancements, every three months.

Although this principle of continuous innovation seems very impressive, but for Oracle customers it is not less than a nightmare for Oracle application managers and business users. The reason for this is that every time a new update is rolled out, it needs to be tested prior to deployment in the production. Though Oracle rolls out quarterly updates after thorough testing, there is still a need of testing since Oracle doesn't test in your specific environment.

What does it means?

It means that Oracle Cloud quarterly updates have the potential to affect a variety of functionalities. It is recommended that you should review every app you're using such as Finance, HR, HCM, Inventory, Procurement, etc. Furthermore, you need to test the user interface as well as critical integrations and custom reports. For all these things, you need a test plan that includes test scenarios and scripts, a timeline, effort, and resource plan.

Enterprises that are using manual testing are struggling to keep pace with Oracle Cloud quarterly updates because

• every quarterly update requires at least two rounds of testing i.e. in the test environment and in the production environment. Thus, you need to test Oracle Cloud 8 times a year. If performed manually, it will consume lot of time.
• ofthe amount of time required from functional analysts and business users for regression testing. First, the updates are deployed in the test environment and two weeks later, they are automatically deployed in production. So, testers have only two weeks to test Oracle. Manually, it is not viable.
• extensive user involvement. The availability of users to execute test cycles acts as a bottleneck in manual testing. Furthermore, repetitive testing can lead to lack of user engagement that eventually results in inadequate testing.
• manually testing 100s of roles and privileges is not technically feasible. Oracle Cloud apps work on role-based security model. With updates, there is always a risk related to Segregation of Duties (SoD) and excessive sensitive accesses that users may attain.

Oracle Cloud test automation with Opkey

To keep pace with the frequency and depth of Oracle Cloud quarterly updates, enterprises need to bring in test automation. Oracle test automation frameworks like Opkey help enterprises to plan, perform and manage the testing process while eliminating the need for extended user involvement in the testing cycles.

Oracle testing platforms like Opkey offers one-click automation to your existing test cases to significantly reduce the automation creation time. Opkey's patent pending test mining technology automatically visualizes all your existing test cases and transform them into automated cases with one click in minutes to eliminate repetitive, time-consuming tasks.

To ensure adequate test coverage, test automation frameworks like Opkey performs Ai-powered test gap analysis and recommends up to 95% of all possible test cases based on your existing business processes and controls. Remaining 5% of the test cases can be created by business/ functional users using Opkey's zero-code test automation. Opkey's Natural Language Processing capabilities allows business users to write test cases in plain English while AI-powered engines convert them into test cases effortlessly. Opkey's Security Validation helps enterprises to immediately know the differences between Function/Data Security policies with a click of a button to maintain compliance.