If you’re utilizing Oracle services and seeking insights into Oracle Cloud Quarterly updates and their significance, this blog is tailored for you. Here, we’ll emphasize the importance of Oracle’s quarterly updates and provide guidance for their smooth integration.
What is Oracle Cloud Quarterly Updates?
Oracle Cloud Applications are developed on the principle of continuous innovation. To ensure seamless functioning of its applications, Oracle rolls out quarterly updates. These contain new features, functionalities, and customer enhancements. Apart from this, they also include bug fixes that are the result of the previous updates. Not only do these updates improve the functionality and performance of the applications but also make organizations compliant.
Oracle’s Quarterly updates include:
· Bug fixes, security alerts, data fixes, and critical patch updates
· New tax, legal, and regulatory updates
· New upgrade scripts
· Certification with new third-party products and versions
· Certification with new Oracle products
Why you need to test quarterly updates from Oracle
Oracle provides its customers with the flexibility to configure their applications as per their unique business needs. Thus, it is recommended that customers should validate their current configuration before trying the new features available in an update. If they don’t follow it, there’s a possibility that applications might show some unexpected behavior. Here’s why you need to test Oracle Cloud Quarterly Updates:
· The quarterly updates have the potential to disrupt your existing custom workflows and business processes.
· Oracle Cloud Applications hardly operate as standalone applications. Often, they integrate with third-party applications like Office 365, 3PL Logistic, etc. Quarterly updates can break critical integration points.
· There’s a possibility that security roles also get impacted by the updates. To ensure that corporate data can only be accessible to the right users and compliance is maintained, security testing needs to be conducted.
Since you’re now aware of the importance of testing, let’s discuss what your testing plan should include.
Testing Plan should include:
· Integration testing to validate APIs (such as XML, REST) still works as expected and exercises your business processes.
· End-to-end testing of external systems such as Office 365, 3PL Logistic, HRMS, etc.
· Critical custom reports
· UI testing that covers users’ daily activities.
· Custom workflows including saved queries and direct SQL updates.
· New enhancements.
How are quarterly updates applied to your environment
· Quarterly updates are first applied to the test environment.
· After two weeks, they are applied to the production environment.
You need to understand that quarterly updates from oracle are mandatory, and they cannot be rescheduled. The two weeks between updating your test and production cadence environments allows you the opportunity to verify that your essential business processes are functioning as anticipated following the update.
Challenges in testing Oracle Updates
· Oracle is a complex application and testing it manually within a short span of two weeks can be very challenging.
· Oracle rolls out quarterly updates. It means you need to test at least 4 times a year. Doing this manually requires a lot of time and effort.
· A single update necessitates several rounds of regression testing. For instance, you must conduct regression testing in both the test environment and the production environment to ensure that everything is functioning correctly.
Summing up
· Since manual regression testing of Oracle Cloud applications is a dauting task, it is recommended that you should bring in test automation. It automates repetitive but necessary tasks, saving time and effort.
· Another advantage of test automation is risk coverage. Manual testing can either result in over testing or under testing. However, both cases cannot ensure adequate risk coverage. Risk-based test automation allows you to test only the impacted business processes.
