We often come across some burning questions that Oracle Cloud customers ask is “How do I ensure my business continuity with Oracle Cloud updates”. Their fear is the result of complexity that comes with the competing demands of keeping existing business running while executing new initiatives every quarter. It’s like trying to change a flat tire while the car is still moving at highway speed.

Let’s take you through one of Oracle's customer journeys. In the year 2020, we came across a project for Oracle Cloud apps testing, where the customer was anxious as he was losing around 550K a year because he wasn’t able to test oracle cloud updates properly.

The story goes something like this:

The customer expressed his pain points, how they couldn’t guarantee system stability during Oracle Cloud updates, and struggled with the overwhelming cost due to the manual analysis required to check each change.

• They struggled to ensure their business continuity post quarterly update hit the Oracle Cloud environment. A number of changes come along with every update but their teams don’t know exactly what they need to test. As a result, they test too much, too little, or the wrong things entirely. There were over 2000 manual test cases associated with that transaction and it took about 1000s of Man-hours to accomplish the task costing them 30% of their testing budget. So testing the update in the 2-week update window period was impossible for them.
• Secondly, their key business users spend enormous time and effort in updating large impacted test libraries after the update. Which cost them about 20% of their total testing expenses.
• Ensuring that their tests are validated and assured for production Go-LIVE with optimum test coverage was impossible for them with manual approach, even though they had no proven method to ensure the test data that is added during update modification is accurate.
• One of their major challenges was ensuring that impacted Security Roles and their Security Policies are validated post quarterly updates, which was nearly impossible with manually testing the updates.

Ultimately they couldn’t certify their business processes post Oracle-Cloud quarterly update.

At that point, they realized that manual testing was no longer sustainable, it became the bottleneck for the company. They had to tell the rest of the business, “We can’t make any changes for you over the next 18 months because we’ve got to focus on these transactions.” Eventually manual testing of  Oracle Cloud applications left them behind in the digital transformation journey.

From the above example and our experience, you can’t continue testing manually, the way that it has always been done, when you have an enterprise that’s moving at the speed of light. This means that you have to address testing and ensure it advances your digital transformation initiatives rather than holds them back.

Path Towards Risk-based Testing Approach

Whichever method you choose, if you can help break down the downstream impacts and challenges of your Oracle Cloud update testing, you will be able to create the ‘aha’ moments for all your concerns.

A risk-based testing approach that catalyzes the benefits of automation, is our answer for your Oracle Cloud update testing challenges.

Incorporate Change-impact Assessments Into Your Current Update Process

Opt for an automated solution that reveals the risks in any cloud update. A predictive Impact analysis that tells what is the change in your transactions, configurations, and custom screens after the update and immediately identifies the testing impacts due to those changes. Provides a real-time Change Impact Analysis report that specifies changes and risks in impacted test scripts across your configured modules and business processes.

Opt For an Autonomous Healing Solution for the Impacted Test Cases

Test scripts needed frequent updates to keep pace with highly-dynamic, accelerated release of Oracle Cloud apps. This results in an overwhelming amount of effort and maintenance cost, an autonomous healing solution is required to automatically synchronize all the impacted test cases. In other words, a seamless solution to certify your business processes post-Oracle Cloud Quarterly Update

Look for the following features in your solution that can ensures your business continuity post quarterly update hit the Oracle Cloud environment:

• Change Impact Advisories highlighting functional and technical changes in your Oracle Cloud application after the update.
• Provide the updated Plugin for handling Technical challenges same weekend of the update
• Provide real-time Change Impact Analysis report to specify changes and risks in impacted test scripts across your configured modules and business processes. 
• Have autonomous Self-Healing capability automatically synchronizes all your impacted test cases, saving you hours of manual effort.
• Have a self-configuring engine to add relevant data combinations into the test scripts and enables risk-based test executions.
• Ensure 100% Compliance and auditable Security Role Validation Report that provides Change Impact across Function/Data Security policies in minutes