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Rohit Bhandari
Rohit Bhandari

Posted on • Originally published at ienglishstatus.com

What is Oracle Cloud Automated Testing?


In Oracle Cloud, automated testing allows organizations to automate application and infrastructure validation with scripted, repeatable tests. Oracle Cloud automated testing enables teams to identify defects sooner, extend coverage, and speed up delivery periods without human involvement. It concentrates on the ability to take advantage of Cloud-based capabilities like elasticity and scalability to run tests effectively in a wide variety of configurations and user contexts with flexibility.

Understanding Cloud testing foundations

Cloud automated testing is the process of running test suites against Cloud-hosted applications and services without the use of on-premises test labs. It takes advantage of virtual machines and containerized environments, dynamically spinning up test agents to scale to different workloads. Teams can schedule and execute functional, performance, and security tests at scale by staging tests in centralized dashboards. The technique minimizes overhead costs related to hardware provisioning, speeds up environment provisioning, and synchronizes testing frequency with faster development cycles, providing feedback on a continuous basis.

Key components of Cloud automated testing

The common cloud testing framework involves test scripts, execution engines, reporting modules, and integration hooks. Test scripts specify the actions and validations to be done against application endpoints or user interfaces. Execution engines run those scripts in parallel on several nodes, reducing feedback loops. Reporting modules gather results, provide dashboards, and monitor the defects over time. Integration hooks allow the testing framework to be linked to version control and CI pipelines to automatically run the tests on code commits. These elements combined provide a unified system to achieve repeatable and reproducible Cloud-based validation.

Setting up automated tests in the Cloud

To get started with Oracle Cloud automated testing, practitioners choose a testing framework that enables remote execution, upload or version-control their test assets, and set up Cloud credentials to provision resources. They establish environment templates, where they define operating systems, middleware, and application versions, to re-establish production-like conditions. With templates in place, test runners can spin instances on the fly, run scripts, and destroy resources when done. This will reduce idle compute expense and maintain consistency in the environment. Data-driven inputs also drive parameterized tests to provide coverage across more scenarios without reconfiguration.

Best practices for effective Cloud testing

Well-designed cloud automated testing incorporates self-contained, testable test scripts, and descriptive names to simplify collaboration among team members. Tests must be divided into priority categories: critical, smoke, regression, to maximize test frequency. The introduction of tagging and grouping mechanisms enables selective runs that trade off between speed and coverage. Monitoring the resource usage and sensible timeouts are necessary to prevent runaway instances. Also, centralized logging and alerts will facilitate the efficient troubleshooting of failures. Periodic analysis of test suites to eliminate redundancy and drift with changing application functionalities maintains efficiency and relevance.

Advantages of Cloud automated testing

Cloud-based test automation offers very high benefits compared to conventional systems, such as on-demand scalability that can scale out or down, depending on workload peaks. This scalability enables extensive regression testing without affecting production workloads. Pay-as-you-go billing provides cost-efficiency by avoiding capital costs of dedicated test hardware. Geo-distributed test agents facilitate testing at a regional scale, enhancing the user experience worldwide. Additionally, connection to development pipelines imposes quality gates, identifying problems prior to code merging. Combined, these benefits speed release rates without compromising stability.

Conclusion

Oracle Cloud automated testing enables teams, particularly new ones, to embrace systematic, scalable application verification. Organizations can enhance test accuracy and velocity by utilizing best practices and efficient pipelines. Opkey, the #1-rated test automation platform and an official partner of Oracle, brings a no-code, AI-driven stack and over 7,000 pre-built test cases to simplify this process. It facilitates ERP, HCM, SCM, and EPM testing, automates 80% of manual tasks, and speeds patch certification and migrations. Opkey is a highly integrated tool that provides comprehensive coverage and enables reliable, agile delivery even in Oracle Cloud environments.

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