DEV Community: Prerna Bhatt

Overcome Oracle EPM Migration Challenges with Continuous Test Automation

Prerna Bhatt — Mon, 06 Dec 2021 14:18:16 +0000

Due to low cost of ownership, data security, real-time access to data, scalability, and flexibility, enterprises across the globe are looking to migrate from on-premises “Oracle Hyperion” to “Oracle Fusion Cloud EPM”. Undoubtedly, there are numerous benefits of migrating to Oracle EPM Cloud, but there are also some concerns as well. CIOs, IT Managers, & IT heads are worried about the initial cost of migration, business disruption, and risks. Furthermore, there is also concern about security, time to transition, ease of adoption, and data conversion.

These concerns are not vague. In fact, they are backed by some potential data.

One of the most recent and widely talked about software glitches happened in a globally renowned Citibank. The glitch in the software at the backed financial system cost them $900 and a bad reputation in the market.

Now, the big question is how to address these challenges.

The answer is “testing”. In fact, testing is crucial to successfully migrate an on-premise EPM application to Oracle Cloud since it ensures that applications are stable, functional, and secure in the new cloud environment. In case, adequate testing is not performed, issues like server crashes, database errors, & application crashes may occur and can be very expensive in terms of time, resources, and customer experience.

In this article, we’ll highlight challenges that customers are facing when moving their Oracle EPM environment from on-premise to the cloud.

Key challenges in Oracle Cloud EPM Migration

Oracle is in control

The biggest challenge that you may face while migrating to the EPM cloud is in the Cloud, Oracle is in control. What exactly does it mean? It means that previously, you’re allowed to customize your solution to fit your business practice. Now, you’re moving into Oracle EPM Cloud. You should be looking for ways to adapt to Oracle Best Practice and utilize configuration to work for you.

What will happen to existing customizations? Does Oracle Best Practice fulfill your business needs?

Will your existing business processes map perfectly with Oracle EPM Cloud configurations?

Are your most critical Oracle EPM Cloud applications fulfilling your compliance requirements?

Adequate testing can only provide your answers to the above questions. Functional & configuration validation testing helps in evaluating the immediate or long-term effects of configuration changes on the system’s behavior and performance. It also helps you to find out the combinations under which the system can work without any flaws or issues while matching its functional requirements.

Challenges for Integration

While migrating to Oracle EPM cloud, IT managers need to understand that their infrastructure is changing 100%. To be honest, it is just not “your infrastructure” anymore. It is controlled by Oracle and your access is heavily restricted. Though Oracle offers interfaces and APIs that can be used to interact with the backend of your applications, however, you may miss out on having full access to their environment as well as a vast number of capabilities for integration and automation. Thus, the obvious question is

Will your existing integrations work in the Oracle EPM Cloud environment?

End-to-end integration testing can also confirm that third-party applications have been seamlessly integrated with the new infrastructure. By performing end-to-end testing, you can check whether or not APIs and libraries are still working and dependencies between applications have been broken.

Data management
Another challenge that enterprises will face while migrating to Oracle EPM Cloud is regarding their current data landscape.
**
Do you really understand your data?**
Do you know about the custom database that is built to manage a specific task?

What about that department that decided to “innovate” and re-use fields for something other than their intended purpose?
Due to differences in data types, security roles and privileges, transaction management, and SQL code, it is important to map the source database schema in Oracle EPM Cloud as this can impact the applications and SQL statements embedded within it. So, data testing needs to be incorporated to ensure that the data is complete, accurate, in the proper format, and as per compliance requirements.

Concluding Remark

Oracle EPM Cloud migration is a difficult process. To ensure that all your business processes work seamlessly in the new Oracle EPM Cloud environment, you need to bring in a good testing strategy. However, a good testing strategy can only benefit you, if you bring in the right automation tool to support it. A zero-code, continuous test automation solution can help you overcome the business disruption, lack of visibility, and project backlogs while achieving optimal user experience. With the right test automation tool, you can effectively implement the “test” focussed Oracle EPM cloud migration strategy.

How Salesforce Test Automation can save your weeks every time you test?

Prerna Bhatt — Fri, 03 Dec 2021 08:03:59 +0000

Due to its variety of SaaS offerings, capability to integrate with range of applications and commitment for continuous innovation, Salesforce has become the most preferred CRM solution for global companies. As its commitment for continuous innovation, Salesforce rolls out three major releases every year i.e. Spring, Summer, & Winter. These releases come with latest and greatest products features.

Events such as data refresh, new functionality or modification of business rules, new integration or new Releases from Salesforce have the potential to impact the quality of your Salesforce deployments. Since validating Salesforce manually is a daunting task, many Salesforce customers often overlook quality assurance that eventually put your business on risk.

If you continue to test your Salesforce instance manually then you might face following challenges

Since Salesforce is a complex application, the testing costs and execution time will be very high due to requirement of huge number of application testers.
Manually, you wouldn’t be able to keep track of all the bugs that require to be fixed to ensure business continuity.
With manual testing, you will struggle to achieve the required levels of testing speed and accuracy that is must in this era of agile.

High turnaround time for test execution, inadequate coverage, and improper testing across security roles are some other challenges related to manual testing.
Since Salesforce ecosystem consists of several moving parts, even the most thorough manual testing program wouldn’t be able to check every possible regression.
Salesforce customers who are struggling to keep pace with frequency of releases need to embrace test automation. By introducing Salesforce Test Automation in your setup, you get the flexibility to run more tests in a very short span on time. Other perks of test automation include enhanced test coverage, faster feedback, and accelerated results. Test automation will give quality and software performance a major push that will eventually improve business values of your company.

However, Salesforce Test Automation is not simple as it appears…
**
**Dynamic Elements – The UI of Salesforce applications consist of dynamic elements that don’t have fixed ID, name, class or CSS attributes. These elements change their locators whenever a test script runs. So, finding a locator of the element is not usually straightforward. In nutshell, dynamic elements influence the stability of the test and changes such as new screens, buttons, user flows or user inputs may lead to test failures, flaky/brittle tests, or build failures.

**IFrames – **Also known as inline frames, these HTML documents are embedded in another HTML page. Since iframes are embedded in other HTML pages, the content gets loaded independently of the page. It is daunting to deal with nested frames since a usual 30-50 step test case would take hours of coding in finding the right attributes and creating the script accordingly.

**Shadow DOMs – **Automating DOM can be challenging as hidden DOM trees are associated with elements in a standard DOM. It means that you’ll find it difficult to find elements for creating a “point and click” type of script. Moreover, developers also add custom HTML tags which are difficult to identify using standard test automation tools like Selenium.

A Move towards Codeless Salesforce Test Automation

To ensure that all Salesforce applications are performing exactly as designed, you need to replace your manual QA and legacy script-based tools with intelligent test automation tools. With this, you can dramatically bring down the risk related to software updates. You can find many cloud based Test Automation tools for Salesforce which comes with inbuilt Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning capabilities. Leveraging AI/ML, automation tools automatically identifies the change made to an element locator (ID), or a screen/flow. Self-healing capabilities automatically fix the test scripts to make test stable.

Leveraging baseline, new age automation tools scan new code to identify test coverage gaps and security issues, enabling test teams to deliver wider test coverage based on risk assessment. In fact, Salesforce test automation will offer you assured benefits like it will cut test execution time from days or weeks to hours, deliver improved test coverage and make you ready to embrace digital transformation at an accelerated pace.

Concluding Remark

Salesforce customers who are struggling to keep pace with faster update cycle need to embrace test automation. However, finding a right test automation tool is a bit tricky since Salesforce is a complex application that supports extensive customization and integration. Tools with technology support for AI, ML, & process mining can help you achieve the required pace and results needed for continuous innovation.

A SHIFT FROM CONTINUOUS TESTING TO AUTONOMOUS AI-DRIVEN TEST AUTOMATION

Prerna Bhatt — Tue, 30 Nov 2021 02:14:28 +0000

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) have transformed almost every sector. The testing industry is no longer an exception to this. It hasn’t been long, we used to discuss the importance of “continuous testing” for “agile” and “DevOps”. Undoubtedly, continuous testing provides the path for swiftly embedding quality assurance by ensuring that changes in the code can be integrated efficiently in the DevOps. However, continuous testingis not a walk in the park due to factors like siloed automation, lack of end-to-end visibility of requirements, high volume tests, etc. This is the time to incorporate Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML) to enable an autonomous and zero-touch QA.

Why is AI for Continuous Testing?

With releases taking place on a weekly basis and updates are rolling out on almost every alternate day, there is a need to streamline software testing by making it smarter and more efficient. Incorporating AI will make the testing process smarter since QA teams can trigger unattended test cycles in which defects can be identified based on insights that are picked from historical data sets and past events. AI-driven algorithms can completely mimic human intelligence while ML automatically updates the test scripts, eliminating unstable test cases. AI-based engines can ensure that only a robust code progresses from one stage to the next and ML-specific algorithms extract patterns by accessing data to make predictions. All this will help in improving software testing.

Given below are some of the scenarios that manifest how AI is about to change testing

Automated Visual Testing for UI –Visual validation is all about ensuring that UI is appearing correctly to the users. It is really difficult to detect discrepancies while testing colour, position, & size of the UI elements while testing manually. AL-based visual testing is all about recognizing the patterns. With AI, it can be ensured that UI appears correctly to the users and UI elements are not overlapped. In nutshell, AI & ML-based tests automatically detect all the visual bugs to validate the visual correctness of the apps.

API Testing –API has taken the central stage of development. However, creating a multitude of scenarios to test API while ensuring coverage is difficult since it requires an understanding of the API. With AI-driven test automation, this problem can be addressed efficiently since AI can identify patterns and connections between API calls and group the scenarios to deliver adequate test coverage.

Test Maintenance – Test stability of apps that feature “dynamic” elements often gets compromised with updates. When changes are made to the app directly in the form of new screens, buttons, or user flows, the static test scripts fail to adapt the changes, resulting in test failures, flaky/brittle tests, or build failures. However, with AI & ML-based test automation , changes to an element locator (ID) are identified automatically and fixes to test scripts happen with self-healing capabilities, reducing the noise related to test failures.

Test Data Generation – Appropriate and proper data is necessary for robust testing. However, enterprises often struggle with transactional data since it is sensitive in nature. Manually synthesizing this data is not only time-consuming but also error-prone. However, with AI, data can be generated easily and can be used to test different scenarios.

More Reliable Test Cases – AI-driven test automation tools can understand your application by identifying relationships between document object model, and changes that occur to apps throughout time. Based on these changes, AI engines can autonomously generate test cases based on risks, eliminating the risk of business disruption with an application update. For instance, Oracle offers quarterly updates. The AI-based approach can be used to highlight the impact of the changes happen due to updates in Oracle Cloud testing. It helps in providing adequate test coverage while limiting the scope of testing based on highlighted impact.

Conclusion

In the age of Agile & DevOps, AI will help enterprises with more robust testing. Understanding the impact of the changes on the business processes, autonomous healing of the test scripts, and effortless test data synthesis can help in taking test automation to the next level. As an IT leader, you should be open to embrace innovation with AI to unleash the true potential of digital transformation

How Test Automation can simplify SAP Application Testing?

Prerna Bhatt — Thu, 25 Nov 2021 05:32:26 +0000

In this fast pace world, SAP customers are struggling to keep pace with continuous updates and delivery. One major cause for this is SAP testing. In the SAP world, manual testing approach is still prevalent. However, manual testing approach has its own drawbacks. For instance, manual testing takes longer and there are also higher risks of bugs being leaked into production that might negatively impact business continuity.

SAP is a complex system that supports both customization and integration. So, organizations can customize it as per their unique business needs and also integrate different legacy and third-party applications. With such ecosystem of applications, manual testing cannot be considered as sustainable.

Some challenges that QA teams face while testing SAP

One of the biggest challenge is to decide what to test and what not to test. It is really difficult for a tester to have all the knowledge such as applications, systems, workflows, process and data flows. Bringing in SAP-specific subject matter expert in the team would lead to budget overruns.

Another challenge is you need new test cases and scripts. However, as per statistics, 70% of the customers have only 30% coverage. So, inadequate testing may expose your business to risks. Apart from this, test designer needs to extract all the knowledge from subject matter expert to create more sustainable tests. Let’s take example of login credential structure. Tester should be aware of the login credential structure otherwise it would impact the test stability.

SAP frequent updates is another challenge which customers using manual testing approach are facing. QA teams need to ensure that code change with release should be bug-free, hasn’t impacted the existing customization and integration and fully functional within its own element. Since test validation depends on multiple users, steps, & functions, manual testing approach may lead to bugs slippage into production. It could lead to business disruption.

Automated Testing –For Accelerated Release & Robust Software Quality

In this era of continuous innovation, when ERP vendors like SAP are continuously expanding their products by incorporating new applications and technologies, organizations should embrace test automation to accelerate their digital transformation. In an ecosystem where business processes are supported by dozens of enterprise apps and digital platforms, test automation ensures that each application is performing as expected. By eliminating human element, automation testing increases the predictability in testing timelines. In case of SAP upgrades, organizations can gain significant benefits by bringing down testing costs up to 50 percent.

SAP test automationis not only time-saving but also helps QA teams to deliver faster validation and ensure early detection of problems or bugs. Apart from cost effective, automation delivers broader test coverage, better insights and also eliminates human errors.

Why do you need a Specific Test Automation Solution for SAP Specific Challenges?

Since SAP testing holds unique challenges, a dedicated SAP Test Automation solution with test management and execution capabilities can help in accelerating your release cycle. Since finding the right test automation tool is a daunting task, there are some features that you should look for while selecting the tool. Test automation tool should have features like auto-creation of test scripts, automatic capturing of test results, etc. In short, testing tool should reduce the manual efforts. The test automation tool should support test lifecycle – test planning, test execution and test validation. Creation of test scripts, workflow validation, sequence of the execution and reporting should also be included.

In fact, automation tool should offer full visibility to test managers and business owners across business processes. One such tool that perfectly fits into this criteria is “OpKey”. Based on advance technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, & process mining, it automatically compares the updates with baseline to generate test-cases based on impacted areas. This feature offers fast, stable and reliable test automation without relying on manual resources while offering more than 90% of test coverage. SAP specific recorder along with AI/ ML reduce overall testing efforts while increasing efficiency.

How can Test Automation Ensure Faster Rollout of your Workday Applications?

Prerna Bhatt — Tue, 23 Nov 2021 15:05:09 +0000

Companies that are using Workday need to realize the importance of testing to ensure that their business-critical processes are performing as intended. Since a defect-free Workday application ensures seamless user experience, business continuity and much better ROI, companies need to embrace continuous testing. While implementing a Workday application, you need to deal with a range of issues like whether or not Workday configuration is in sync with your business processes or proper data security is in place. The best answer to these questions is testing. Furthermore, whenever you create a new integration or introduce a new business process, you need regression testing to ensure the stability of your system.

Another challenge is Workday’s frequent updates. To offer new functionality, improved user experience, new features and bug fixes, Workday offers two major launches annually. Though Workday also tests its application, you need to pay attention to business processes, integration, & security. Prior to deployment in the production, it is recommended to regressively test business-critical processes across new release environments to ensure that everything remains fine post-launch.

Why is it difficult to test the Workday application manually?

Though manual testing is still prevalent, it cannot be considered a reliable solution due to inaccuracy, inadequate coverage, and ineffectiveness. Organizations that are using the manual testing approach find it difficult to keep pace with the depth and breadth of the Workday biannual release cycle. Other challenges related to manual testing include the inability to identify problem areas, inefficiency in tackling iterative processes, and the probability of bug leakage due to human error.

Why test automate Workday application?

In this era of continuous innovation, when platforms like Workday are incorporating new applications, test automation ensures that your critical business processes work at all times. Test automation not only eliminates the human element to improve accuracy but also enhances the predictability in testing timelines. With test automation, by validating business processes, you can achieve significant benefits when it comes to embracing upgrades. Automation also has the potential to bring down costs by up to 50 percent. Some of the biggest perks related to automation testing is that enterprises can achieve maximum accuracy along with accelerated results and broader test coverage.

How to automate tests in Workday?

Since embracing test automation can offer seamless benefits for your enterprise, you need to choose the test automation solution based upon your requirements. It is certainly a daunting task due to the availability of different solutions in the market. Which test automation solution can work for you? We need to analyze different tools.

Let’s start with a standard, open-source tools. Due to its availability as an “open source” tool, Selenium is considered the most preferable choice for QA teams. However, the most pertinent question is “Can Workday be automated with Selenium?” Test automating Workday with Selenium poses some serious challenges like good programming skills are needed to write complex test cases. Since Selenium is a testing library, testers need to write codes and execute tests. However, bitter truth is business users don’t know programming and on-boarding programmers to write test scripts will result in budget overruns. Another challenge is “Workday” features dynamic elements. Since Selenium uses attributes like id, class, XPath, tag name, etc., it will be really daunting and time-consuming to locate dynamic elements.

So, it is recommended that for Workday test automation,you should select a zero-code test automation platform. With zero code, your testers can simply create test cases by the record and play. Furthermore, most zero code test automation tools for Workday come with prebuilt keywords that can easily handle database-driven tables, enabling testers to filter or select accurate outputs based on event and text labels.

In nutshell, a test automation solution with pre-built accelerators, keywords, & functional components helps to reduce overall test cycle time, efforts, while reducing the cost of repetitive manual testing. Furthermore, enterprises get almost 100% test coverage using AI-driven Impact Analysis to reduce risk, enhancing quality and reliability.

Oracle Cloud Frequent Updates: Great Power brings Great Responsibility

Prerna Bhatt — Fri, 19 Nov 2021 07:01:46 +0000

Due to numerous advantages such as reduced IT costs, business disaster recovery, scalability, flexibility, & security enterprises across the globe are moving to cloud. Among numerous available cloud options, Oracle Cloud is favourite for Oracle EBS users since migration can be done without requiring much of configuration, integration, or business process changes. However, with great power also comes great responsibility. To ensure that customers can efficiently and effectively manage their business, Oracle rolls out quarterly updates consisting of bug-fixes, new features, & functionality. Before enabling any feature, anyone responsible for managing Oracle cloud apps needs to understand how that new feature will impact current business processes and procedures. However, it is not as simple as it appears. In this blog, we’ll discuss why traditional testing approaches will not work with Oracle Cloud and why test automation has become a necessity rather than a luxury to test Oracle Cloud Apps.

Why you simply cannot trust Oracle Cloud Updates without testing?
Although, issues due to Oracle updates are rare, yet it is recommended that you should test the updates prior to deployment in the production. There might be a possibility that a new bug could be introduced with the updates or a bug that has been fixed can negatively impact your business processes. Apart from this, there is also a possibility that customizations if any or critical integrations with other applications might get break due to quarterly updates.

Why manual testing approach cannot be considered as a viable solution?

Although manual testing approach is still prevalent, it cannot be considered as a viable solution in the case of Oracle Cloud updates. Apart from inaccurate, time-consuming, & error-prone, there are several other reasons for that.

Quarterly updates means that every three months, customers will receive new functionality that needs to be tested. In nutshell, testing needs to be done 4 times a year which can be considered as non-feasible if performed manually.

Prior to deployment in the production, Oracle Cloud updates are first deployed in non-production environment. Oracle provides short testing duration of two weeks to test critical reports, workflow approvals, and critical integrations with other applications. It is again very exhaustive if performed manually.
Oracle updates have the potential to affect functionalities as well as key workflows. However, manual testing is considered as viable due to limited test coverage and inability to identify the most impacted areas.

Test Automation – Helping you to seamlessly test Oracle Cloud updates

The possible solution should not only help in reducing test execution time, but also helps in defining scope of testing as well as deliver broader test coverage that covers not only Oracle Cloud Apps but also the integrated applications. Test Automation solution can be scaled as per changing needs and offers support for web, mobile, APIs, Desktop, Citrix, Mainframes and other legacy applications.

You should be looking for an Oracle test automation solution that not only offers test accelerators and functional libraries to help you executing testing cases across financial, planning, budgeting, and forecasting but also helps you in visualizing the impact of every configuration change or update on business continuity. If the test automation solution supports self-healing of automation scripts, then it will take away the effort requiring for maintenance.

Migrating Oracle EBS to Cloud via Test Automation to Avoid Challenges

Prerna Bhatt — Wed, 17 Nov 2021 09:16:03 +0000

Migrating Oracle EBS to Cloud Challenges

Enterprises that have been using Oracle EBS for a long time have customized it as per their unique business needs. However, when you move to the Oracle Cloud, you only have configurations and very limited customizations. Some of the existing configurations in EBS might work in the oracle cloud while some will be replaced by standard business flows available in Oracle Cloud. So, critical workflows and business processes need to be tested.

Many enterprises have integrated Oracle EBS with productivity tools such as Google Docs, payroll services, or Microsoft Office 365. While migrating to Oracle cloud, enterprises need to plan the testing across integration points to find out adapter-related issues, runtime issues, & file-server-related issues.

Oracle rolls out quarterly updates along with security patches and minor updates to deliver new features, functionality, & bug fixes. For update readiness, enterprises need to understand how changes have impacted the existing configurations and business processes. Whether or not new features have negatively impacted the existing processes?

To test the configurations and multiple scenarios, often QA teams struggle to have relevant data sets. So, adequate relevant data needs to be prepared to execute testing.

Migrating Oracle EBS to Cloud via Test Automation

Risk-based Continuous Migration Testing is all about testing early, often, & comprehensively. Configuration testing is a vital phase of this strategy that helps you to identify, outline and analyze your existing business processes. Some of the common examples of configuration testing are

Ledger configurations
Sub-ledger Accounting rules
Tax geographies
Organization geographies

Risk-based
continuous test automation eliminates all the guesswork out of determining what needs to be tested. Rather it helps you to identify the most at-risk areas and recommends test cases for the same. It eliminates hours of effort and struggle, enabling QA teams to find out.

What gaps exist in SaaS (Oracle Cloud) as compared to existing business processes in Oracle EBS?

What happens to your existing customizations and extensions?

Do the existing configurations are still working in the cloud environment?

Do some of the customized workflows get replaced by standard configurations?

Apart from ensuring risk-free migration, risk-based testing also provides you update readiness for the releases. Since change automatically synchronizes across all your impacted areas, it alleviates the "maintenance burden" that undermines the test automation initiatives. Thus, with risk-based Oracle EBS Automation, you can make a risk-free migration.

Tame the Risks of Oracle Cloud Updates by Modernizing Your Testing Tools and Strategies

Prerna Bhatt — Mon, 15 Nov 2021 10:00:02 +0000

To achieve agility and more responsiveness, businesses are migrating to cloud. One such cloud infrastructure is Oracle Fusion (also known as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure). Oracle Fusion is perfect for organizations that use custom applications to manage their traditional back-office and customer-facing processes. Oracle Fusion allows custom applications to leverage Oracle databases to manage business-critical data with minimal re-architecture, re-integration or business process changes. Oracle Fusion seamlessly integrates with legacy frameworks through cloud infrastructure and platform, offering more flexibility, more reliability while delivering higher performance at a lower cost. However, the biggest hurdle that organizations need to overcome in their cloud journey is to verify the implementations.

Since enterprises rely heavily on application based processes, application testing has become more important than ever. QA teams need to ensure that functionality is working fine before getting into production and also required to monitor application performance during production in order to prevent unplanned outages of business-critical applications. As organizations use disparate applications for separate business processes, a significant disconnect occurs between business lines and QA professionals. In case, QA professionals don’t work in sync with business leaders, then test plans may not accurately reflect end user requirements. If applications are tested only after the configuration or development process is complete, then costly rework may impact the project schedule.

In the scenario of agile development, continuous testing is the most recommended thing. Furthermore, quarterly releases by Oracle for Fusion Application requires upgrading and regression testing at least 4 times/year. Every release comes with new functionalities, features and bug fixes. Thus, each Oracle Cloud/ Fusion Application release needs functional and technical analysis to understand the impact on the environment. Regression testing of applications is required prior to upgrading the production environments. Manual testing won’t help as it is time consuming. Furthermore, the time window of updates for DEV/Test instance and production is two weeks only.

How to overcome Oracle Fusion Testing challenges?

To ensure quality in the application, automated testing needs to be involved in the application development or upgrade lifecycle. Incorporating testing in the early development stages helps enterprises to achieve clear business objectives while minimizing the repairs needed at the end of the project. When critical errors are identified and addressed at an earlier stage of development, it ensures higher-quality applications and a better end user experience. Furthermore, when updates are introduced, testing ensures that new configurations or functionality does not break the application or produce downstream implications.

Testing Made Easy with OpKey for Oracle Fusion

OpKey is a leading AI driven test automation platform
that offers native support for Oracle Forms for robust GUI controls recognition. OpKey’s self-healing technology ensures that your test assets keep in sync with changes so that unexpected changes don’t disturb your critical processes.

Processing Time – Time window in Oracle Fusion for quarterly patch application
in DEV/Test instance and production is just two weeks. So, customers get two weeks only to test, analyse results and impact of updates. As the leading Continuous Testing platform for Oracle Fusion, OpKey reduces testing time by up to 80% while enabling faster validation of Oracle Cloud quarterly patch upgrade.

Reliability – To ensure reliability in testing, OpKey offers 1000+ prebuilt test cases and components and its configuration engine continuously updates to ensure that tests are always in sync with the latest Oracle Cloud update. Leveraging context and meta data of Oracle Cloud, OpKey helps you to build more maintainable tests.

Widest Test Coverage – OpKey delivers multiple sets of data to provide maximum test coverage. You can also parameterize your tests with an in-built data editor while also getting the flexibility to import test data into the system from databases, excels and XMLs.

Test Automation for everyone – With OpKey, everyone can participate in test automation. OpKey offers Zero code scripting for test engineers, Offline Code Editor for Developers and Test Orchestrator interface for business Users.

Impact Analysis – With OpKey, you can visualize changes happening across the entire software development chain in real time while its Impact Analysis engine helps you to analyse the impact of the updates/ patches on your critical business processes.

Investigating Challenges and Best Practices of Salesforce Test Automation

Prerna Bhatt — Sun, 14 Nov 2021 17:56:42 +0000

Undoubtedly, Salesforce is the globally recognized CRM solution with 150,000+ customers. However, to check whether configurations and codesareoperational and Salesforce instance is supporting your business processes, testing of Salesforce is crucial. Whether you’re system architecture, admin, developer or QA head, you need to test your instance to identify the release readiness, potential errors, and areas that might need improvement. Thus, we can say that Salesforce testing is important because

A bad release can cost you revenue, reputation and profit.

A bug leakage to production can have a devastating impact on business continuity.

Poor quality can lead to bad business reputation.
However, testing critical workflows, key integrations, multitude of data sources, enhancements, customizations, and custom reports is not a walk in the park with respect to Salesforce. Enterprises that are still using manual testing approaches need to understand that it cannot be considered as a viable solution because it is time consuming, offers inadequate coverage, inaccurate and can lead to business disruption.

Salesforce is a complex application and enhancements, customizations, or modifications in the business rules or new Releases have potential to impact your current business processes. Validating software for multiple iterations manually is daunting.

Some of the challenges that enterprises might face in Salesforce testing are given below.

If you’re looking to move from “Classic” to “Lightning”, then you need to understand that test scripts written for one version may not be used for other.

Lightning comes with new layouts, navigation, integrations, & workflows. So, number of use cases has been increased tremendously.

Salesforce rolls out releases three times a year. So, testing thrice the software can be daunting and inadequate coverage can lead to business disruptions.

Address these Challenges with Salesforce Test Automation
To address these challenges enterprises should opt for Salesforce Test Automation. Introducing automation will help QA teams to achieve increased test coverage along with faster feedback. Automation will improve the whole testing process by speeding up feedback, quick detection of bugs, and robust reporting.

Although there are numerous benefits of introducing automation in Salesforce testing, there are certain challenges also that need to be addressed. Some of these challenges are listed below.

Salesforce is a complex app in which front-end is built with dynamic frames. Since, Salesforce don’t have fix ID, name, class or CSS attributes, you cannot hard code the locator of the element.

Salesforce uses components such as Shadow DOM to deliver compatibility with all browsers. However, many open source test automation platforms do not support them natively.

Tables in Salesforce are database driven. The rows and columns are created dynamically as per the user privileges. Performing actions on these tables using standard automation tools is complicated.

Salesforce has two major versions i.e. “Classic” and “Lightning”. So, it is not necessary that automation scripts that supports “Classic” will also support “Lightning”.

Salesforce rolls out releases thrice a year. In case of code-based solutions, test scripts might get break due to change in dynamic elements while in recorders, testers might need to re-record every time due to changes in the configurations.

The proposed solution: AI-Powered Test Automation Framework
Enterprise should look for AI-powered test automation platform
for Salesforce that not only identifies where automation scripts have broken but also heals them automatically to reduce the maintenance burden. The test automation framework should be able enough to identify how changes have impacted the current configurations, enabling QA teams to understand risk and production readiness of the releases. The test scripts should work on both the interfaces and while AI-driven risk-based testing approach should help in minimizing efforts by recommending what needs to be tested based on risk levels.

Understanding & Addressing Common Challenges in Oracle Cloud Continuous Testing

Prerna Bhatt — Fri, 12 Nov 2021 07:18:47 +0000

Businesses across the globe are replacing on-premise, legacy systems with scalable and agile computing systems in the cloud to avail advantages like reduced IT costs, data security, and business continuity. One such highly popular cloud is Oracle Cloud. It is considered as a hot-pick among enterprises due to its support for customer-facing apps or custom database applications.

Custom Apps can be easily migrated to Oracle Cloud infrastructure with minimal re-architecture, re-integration or business process changes. Another advantage which it offers to its customers is continuous innovation in the form of quarterly updates. However, enterprises that have already migrated to Oracle cloud are struggling to implement continuous testing for Oracle Cloud Apps. In this article, we’ll discuss what major challenges enterprises are facing in continuously testing their Oracle Cloud Apps. We’ll also discuss how to address these challenges with AI-driven test automation.

Top Challenges in implementing continuous testing for Oracle Cloud Apps

continuous testing
is all about testing early, often, & comprehensively to accelerate release cycles and to reduce risks. To implement continuous testing, it is necessary to implement test automation. However, in the case of Oracle Cloud Apps, implementing automation is not as easy as it appears due to the following reasons.

Oracle cloud apps consists of dynamic web elements that don’t have fixed attributes like ID, class, name, or CSS. So, standard test automation tools that use element properties to identify controls cannot be used as elements in Oracle cloud changes dynamically.
The tables in Oracle Cloud apps are database driven. It means that rows and columns in the tables are created dynamically and changes as per the privileges of the user.

In case, if you’re able to automate Oracle Cloud Apps, then maintenance of automation will require huge efforts. Since Oracle Cloud Apps features dynamic elements and updates are rolled out quarterly, there are chances that automation scripts break whenever there is a change in the object property (Name, ID, Xpath, CSS etc.).

The Proposed Solution

To address these challenges, enterprises need to invest in the right test automation framework that not only overcome the challenges of the dynamic elements but also make automation script maintenance effortless. Oracle cloud quarterly updates have the potential to disrupt business processes if updates are deployed without testing. So, enterprises should look for a test automation framework that can help IT, managers, in understanding the impact of the changes/ new features on the current business processes and procedures.

So, enterprises should opt for an Oracle test automation
platform that not only specifies changes and risks in impacted automation scripts across your configured modules and business processes but also takes away your automation script maintenance efforts by autonomously healing scripts. AI-powered test automation framework can automatically identify the changes and heal the script autonomously. So, you don’t have to worry about changes in the object property.

Enterprises should opt for a framework that takes away the burden by autonomously recommending test cases based on the highlighted risks to ensure maximum coverage. Investing in such a test automation framework will help you embrace innovation by quickly validating configurations, workflows, reports, & integrations.

How to address Oracle EBS to Oracle Cloud testing Challenges with test automation?

Prerna Bhatt — Thu, 11 Nov 2021 09:46:51 +0000

To avail the benefits of real-time data, scalability, flexibility, & low costs of ownership, enterprises across the globe have started embracing cloud ERP. Oracle EBS users are no more and exception to this. They are looking to migrate from on-prem Oracle EBS to Oracle Cloud. Although, Oracle has suggested that EBS users can migrate to Oracle cloud without requiring much of re-architecture, re-integration or business process changes, yet CIO, IT Managers, & Digital Leaders are worried about business continuity and other concerns related to Oracle Cloud Apps. In this article, we’ll discuss the challenges that Oracle Cloud App Managers face during testing and how test automation can help in addressing those challenges.

Some of the challenges that Oracle Cloud App Managers face:

To Deliver Transformation Faster:

For successful Oracle cloud migration, IT managers need to identify all the test scenarios, creating the testing assets, and executing them across customizations and integrations. However, identifying which test cases are important and at what stage is really daunting. Whatever test cases testers consider important may not be important at every stage. In most of the cases, when testers try to cover high risks thoroughly, they only tend to achieve 40-50% of coverage. Due to inadequate coverage, IT managers lose confidence on Oracle release maturity.

Manage Testing at Constant Changes:Oracle Cloud Apps are constantly evolving with quarterly releases. Every three months, customers will get the new features and functionalities to streamline their business processes. Since these updates have the potential to break existing business processes, it is recommend to test updates every quarter prior to deployment in the production. However, Oracle Cloud testing every quarter is challenging. Even elite enterprise testing teams find themselves severely challenged by the intensity and frequency of change.

Critical Business Processes: Organizations that have been using Oracle EBS for a long time has customized it as per their unique business processes. Oracle EBS can also be integrated with third-party apps and productivity tools. However, in case of Oracle Cloud, you can configure and personalize apps but the ability to customize has taken away. Oracle cloud apps supports integration using SOAP, XML etc., however, Oracle EBS don’t support these protocols. So, there are chances that critical business workflows, customizations and integrations might not work in new cloud environment.

Continuous Testing Approach – Helping Enterprises to realize their Digital Dreams

Although traditional testing approaches and legacy test automation frameworks are still prevalent, these cannot be considered as viable in case of Oracle testing . Neither they help you keep pace with Oracle frequent updates nor do they help in delivering adequate coverage. IT leaders need to embrace new generation continuous testing approach that supports testing life-cycle by autonomously

generating testing artifacts for Oracle Cloud Apps, recommending test cases, autonomously healing automation scripts and automatically executing test cases through the life-cycle of the project.

The proposed test automation solution should support

Continuous Testing: The test automation framework for Oracle Cloud Apps should support continuous testing. It is about testing early, often and comprehensively to accelerate release cycles and lower the risks. By providing quick feedback on the business risks, continuous test automation framework enables business teams to meet digital transformation initiatives while helping IT managers to make informed decisions on release.

Autonomous Recommendations of Tests: Enterprises need a platform that autonomously recommends test cases based on the highlighted risks. By accessing the impact of the changes and understanding the risk areas, test automation framework recommends test cases while ensuring adequate coverage of mission critical applications.

Self-healing of Test Scripts: QA teams often struggle to continuously maintain the test scripts. In case of Oracle Cloud Apps, due to dynamic elements, test scripts get broken which require to be maintained. Enterprises should opt for test automation framework that automatically heals the test scripts without requiring human intervention. In case, when you need to test apps quarterly, self-healing capabilities make maintenance effortless.

End-to-End Business Process Validation: Test automation framework should support multiple technology stack including web, mobile, APIs, Desktop, Citrix, Mainframes and other legacy applications.

Understanding the benefits of Salesforce Test Automation

Prerna Bhatt — Wed, 10 Nov 2021 06:36:00 +0000

Salesforce Test Automation – Undoubtedly, Salesforce is the globally recognized CRM (customer relationship management) software that delivers continuous innovation with its three seasonal releases -spring, summer, and winter. As its commitment towards its customers, Salesforce offers hundreds of innovative features that help enterprises to seamlessly connect with its customers. However, enterprises that have embraced Salesforce, often struggle to keep pace with its rapid release cycles. Although manual testing approach is still prevalent, however it cannot be considered as trustworthy due to inaccuracy, errors due to human intervention, and inability to identify risks. In this article, we’ll discuss the drawbacks of manual testing, why automation is essential for Salesforce testing, challenges in implementing test automation and how to tackle these challenges.

Let’s discuss the drawbacks of manual Salesforce testing.

It is cumbersome, time-consuming, & can slow-down your delivery cycle.

Inadequate test coverage and inaccuracies due to manual intervention.

Since it requires more time, it also costs you more.
Defects can slip into production and can disrupt business continuity.

Salesforce test automation is considered as the most appropriate solution to address these challenges. Introduction of test automation not only eliminates the drawbacks of manual testing but also add value to your enterprise by maximizing Salesforce ROI for your company.

Table of Contents

Benefits of Salesforce Test Automation
Accelerated Speed and Improved Efficiency
Improved Test Coverage
Reduced Business Risks
Benefits of Salesforce Test Automation
Accelerated Speed and Improved Efficiency
Since manual efforts are reduced, automation speeds up the testing process and also increases the testing efficiency as testers don’t have to do testing based on guesses. Rather they need to test according to the highlighted risks.

Improved Test Coverage

Unlike manual testing approach in which test cases are created and executed on the basis of guesses and tester’s experience, test automation follows a more reliable risk-based testing approach in which tests are executed based on the highlighted risks. Prior to deployment in production, every release is technically and functionally analysed for the impact and risks.

Reduced Business Risks

Since
test automation involves use of artificial intelligence and other innovative technologies to deliver adequate coverage, it also reduces the business risks. The releases are deployed in production only after proper testing and change impact assessment, making businesses disruption free.

There is no iota of doubt that
Salesforce test automation delivers several benefits for your business. However, there are challenges in its implementation. Salesforce updates bring constant changes and improvements. Your Salesforce test automation platforms need to absorb these updates to avoid any problem.

The dynamic elements (with no fixed attributes like ID, name, CSS, Xpath, etc) in Salesforce are hard to automate.

Salesforce uses Shadow DOM technology to deliver compatibility across all browsers, however, many automation tools do not support it natively.

It is not mandatory that same test scripts work in “Classic” as well as “Lightning” version of Salesforce.

Due to dynamic elements, there are chances that test scripts get broken and test stability gets affected during the releases.
To address these challenges, you need a Salesforce test automation platform that not only supports both “Classic” and “Lightning” versions but also fix test scripts automatically. The test automation framework shouldn’t get affected with dynamic elements and can also provide change impact assessment and risk-based test recommendations.