Oracle Quarterly Updates: The Comprehensive Guide

Oracle works on the principle of continuous improvement and innovations. It rolls out quarterly updates for its cloud applications. In this blog, we will highlight the importance of Oracle Quarterly updates for stability and robustness of applications. We’ll highlight why testing is critical to updates and showcase how test automation can help you.

Overview of Oracle Cloud Applications

Oracle offers enterprise applications to manage critical business processes across an organization. For instance, Oracle Cloud Applications are a suite of SaaS applications that streamline and automate critical business processes with the help of enterprise resource planning system, supply chain management platform, human capital management solution, advertising and customer experience.

What are Oracle Quarterly Updates?

Oracle Quarterly Updates contain new features, customer enhancements, and functionalities that allow customers to efficiently manage their critical business processes. These updates also contain resolutions for issues that occurred since the last update. 

Why are Oracle Quarterly Updates critical to your business?

Oracle Quarterly Updates cloud include:

• new tax, legal, and regulatory updates
• security updates and data fixes
• certification with new third-party products
• certification with new Oracle products
• resolutions for issues that have occurred since the last update

Customers can’t ignore these updates since they are critical for stability and robustness of Oracle applications. Furthermore, they help customers to remain compliant with regulations, avoiding hefty penalties. 

Why does Oracle update testing critical?

Every Oracle App is configured as per your unique business needs. Furthermore, Oracle Apps often integrate with other enterprise apps. When updates are rolled out, there is a possibility that they may negatively impact your existing configurations, customizations, and integrations.  

That’s why Oracle first rolls out releases in the test environment and gives customers two weeks-time to validate their configurations. Oracle recommends that customers should confirm whether their critical business flows are supported as expected after the update. In the case, there are any unexpected issues, they should report to Oracle Support team. 

Why is there a need of test automation?

As stated above, Oracle rolls out quarterly updates. This means that if you’re an Oracle customer, you’ll get innovative updates four times a year. Each Oracle update requires at least two rounds of testing. It means, customers need to test Oracle Apps at least 8 times a year. Doing this manually cannot be a logical solution keeping the frequency and testing window of two-weeks. 

This problem can be addressed perfectly with test automation. By automating repetitive steps, test automation speeds up the testing process, providing sufficient time to QA teams to perform testing. Apart from this, manual testing is also subjected to inadequate coverage since regression testing suites are picked up as per the understanding of the testers. 

Test automation platforms that supports risk-based testing can be very helpful as they can prioritize testing as per highlighted risks. 

Which test automation tools an organization should prefer?

According to Oracle, your test strategy should include:

• Integration tests. These will confirm APIs (such as XML, REST) still work.
• Integrated third-party apps. These tests will evaluate different parameters such as rating, distance and service time engines.
• Critical business processes.
• Custom reports.
• UI tests.

Keeping these points in mind, we recommend Opkey test automation platform. Here’s why:

End-to-end coverage: Opkey supports 12+ ERPs and 150+ technologies to offer end-to-end coverage to its customers. It further supports different combinations of browsers, operating systems, and mobile devices to ensure adequate coverage. 

No-code automation: Oracle Cloud quarterly updates are often tested by business users. Since business users are non-technical folks, code-based platforms will not offer any significant benefits to them. As a no-code, AI-enabled platform, Opkey allows business users to create test cases with a click of a button. 

AI-powered Test Recommendations: Opkey is an AI-enabled platform. When new release is rolled out, Opkey performs impact assessment and recommends test cases based on the impacted business processes. So, QA team only needs to test the impacted areas.