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Utilizing Oracle Cloud: 3 Reasons to Automate Your Oracle Testing

The ability to regularly and easily update your ERP, HCM, and SCM systems is one of the best things about the Oracle Cloud. You can explore new features, leverage the latest innovations, and continuously streamline your business processes.

But the quarterly upgrades—which happen like clockwork—can still pose challenges. Your IT team needs to test the changes to ensure your organization knows what will happen once the updates occur, and has an opportunity to mitigate any new issues that may arise. Currently, most of that testing is performed manually. It’s time-consuming, expensive, and ripe for human errors.

It also detracts IT from working on projects that further the innovation and the business. That’s why I’m a big advocate of automated testing. We recently launched XpressTest, a new Oracle ERP testing tool and service that helps you manage the quarterly update testing process.

Here are three key benefits of automating your ERP testing—so that your IT can spend time on higher-value work:

Automated testing reduces your costs.

Testing in advance of updates can be unpredictable. Each quarter presents a new and varied batch of updates, requiring different scripts and fixes. Typically, companies rely on IT teams to manually test features and functions and then document the results. It’s an effort that consumes hours of staff time. With automated testing, you can save on IT expenses in a few ways. First, automation reduces the burden on staff. In fact, our clients currently experience a 70% reduction in staff time devoted to testing. And with a fixed cost for the service, the testing expense is very predictable.

It’s scalable and ready to grow with your organization.

Automated testing is primed to scale. The process is designed to test and repeat, regardless of the number of cloud applications you’re currently running or updates occurring. For example, with XpressTest, we can easily add scenarios through repeatable sections and the data repository. Our knowledge of the update increases as we test across multiple organizations, which benefits our clients as well. We can also sequence consecutive tests and schedule the execution, performing them 24/7 to ensure that the tests occur early enough in the two-week testing window to remediate any issues identified. What’s more, we can perform negative tests—that is, testing to see if something fails. For instance, you may want to prevent users with specific security IDs from accessing certain applications or information. A negative test can ensure that’s the case.

Automated testing provides reproducible results.

By automating your Oracle ERP testing, you can guarantee that the test occurs, in the same way, every time. This is no small feat. Human errors in testing can surface problems that aren’t actually problems, or in reverse, miss significant issues. The fixes can also introduce new bugs. Automated testing eliminates the human element. The results are reproducible, which is essential for effective testing. They results are documented in a detailed way. Our XpressTest service provides detailed reports with screenshots, success/failure information, and date and time stamps that reveal what was tested and when. The documentation makes it easy to track any areas of concern and repeat tests on areas that may be problematic. They also ensure you are prepared for audits, with all the information you need at your fingertips.

The Oracle Cloud offers efficiencies and new capabilities that improve your business. The regular updates ensure your systems keep pace with the latest developments and that your organization benefits from leading ERP/HCM/SCM technology. Automated testing is the logical next step, allowing you to scale your quarterly testing cost-effectively. That way, you can focus on maximizing everything the cloud has to offer.

Interested in learning more about XpressTest? Contact us today.