Oracle Automation testing: Why is it difficult to implement

As a part of its principle of continuous innovation, Oracle rolls out quarterly updates, monthly patches and customer enhancements. Testing is imperative after patches, updates or configuration changes to ensure business continuity. Enterprises that are still leveraging manual testing approaches are struggling to keep pace with Oracle’s innovative changes. The reasons are obvious. Each Oracle update requires testing at least twice i.e. first round in the test environment, and the second round two weeks later in the production environment.

It means that customers need to test Oracle 8 times a year. Moreover, the timing of deployment of updates from test instance to production is just two weeks.  Manually doing this can be very time consuming, erroneous and laborious as a single scenario may require multiple clicks, data entry and navigation through multiple screens. The best option to address these challenges is Oracle automation testing.

Oracle automation testing is a viable solution, however implementing it is quite tricky due to some obvious reasons. In this article, we’ll discuss those reasons and suggest how Oracle test automation solution should look like.

Why Oracle automation testing is challenging?

1. Oracle is a highly dynamic application that has elements with dynamic locators. It means that Oracle’s element don’t have fixed attributes like ID, Name, Class, or CSS. To hard code the locator, you first need to identify that. However, it is not straight forward and even if you’re able to identify it, you’ll get a flaky and unstable script.
2. Due to dynamic elements, even a minor change in the UI i.e. new screens, buttons or user flows can result in test failures or flaky/brittle tests. In a scenario, when you have to test Oracle applications at least 8 times a year, test script maintenance would be a great burden.
3. Oracle apps use frame and iframes. Identifying objects and hard code them will require coding expertise. Not only this can be time consuming and costly, but finding a resource having knowledge across coding and Oracle can be very difficult.
4. Enterprises often extend their Oracle Apps by integrating them with other applications like CRM or productivity tools such as Office 365/ SharePoint. Manually testing the entire Oracle ecosystem can be very daunting and inaccuracies can expose your business to serious risks.

These are technical reasons that make Oracle automation testing difficult. Building Oracle automation framework from scratch is not a wise choice as it’ll consume lot of time and money. All you need is to incorporate test automation platform with following attributes.

1. No Code Test Automation: The responsibility of Oracle testing lies with business users and not the vendors or implementation partners. Since business users are not programmers, you need Oracle automation testing platform that doesn’t require any programming knowledge to create test scripts.
2. Script Maintenance: Don’t opt for Oracle test automation framework that uses static test scripts. Automation frameworks that use static test scripts fail to automatically adapt and overcome the changes, leading to unstable tests.
3. Risk Coverage: Regression testing is still performed on the basis of experience or sometimes guesses are made in selecting a regression. Opt for AI test automation platform that considers a greater number of parameters than are humanly possible and determine the size of the regression test suite with great precision.

For example, you can opt for Opkey, a no code test automation platform that

1. Uses Natural Language Processing, enabling business users to create test cases in plain English language while AI powered engines autonomously convert those into automation scripts.
2. Uses machine learning to alleviate “maintenance burden” that undermines the test automation initiatives. Opkey’s Self-healing capability identifies changes and automatically synchronize across all your impacted test cases, saving you hours of manual effort.
3. Uses AI to recommend test cases based upon risks. Opkey offers a real time impact analysis report that gives you the information on the changes across the configurations, transactions and custom screens so that impacted areas can be tested first.