The Oracle Functional/Load Testing Advanced Pack for Oracle Utilities is a service based automated testing solution based around the popular Oracle Application Testing Suite. The main focus of this product to allow implementations of Oracle Utilities products to adopt automated testing quickly using prebuilt service based components to verify the product against your business processes and with your data. This is a fundamental principle of the solution.
Traditionally automated testing uses the user interface as the conduit to perform functional/load testing. There are a number of issues with that approach:
- Traditionally you have to record a session to build testing assets. The data along with the user interaction are recorded and converted into a programmable script (using some scripting language). The data is typically associated with the test and to reuse the same process with different data you would have to either re-record the test or manually edit the scripting, which requires some programming experiences, to put new data into the script. This can involve quite a bit of test asset building and management. By the way, you can use Oracle Application Testing Suite in this mode as well if you did not have the Oracle Functional/Load Testing Advanced Pack for Oracle Utilities but the unique advantage of the Oracle Application Testing Suite is that that user interface is componentized for reuse.
- If you use the user interface as the basis of the testing then ANY change to user interface that you perform (or the vendor performs) will invalidate the recorded script. One big example of this is that all the latest Oracle Utilities products are moving to a new user interface, to support a wide range of devices, which required the user interface to change. This even alone would invalidate user interface based scripting and require those assets to be rebuilt.
The Oracle Functional/Load Testing Advanced Pack for Oracle Utilities uses a service based approach which utilizes the service layer that the user interface passes data to (and from). The solution passes the same data as the screens would internally pass to the underlying services. There are a number of distinct advantages of this approach:
- The service based approach is isolated from any user interface changes whether the change was introduced in a new version or as part of your implementation. The main focus is always functionality testing of the underlying business services.
- The service based testing components are prebuilt, against our base services. They are verified against the product as the product QA teams use these components to verify the product in QA. If a prebuilt service component is not appropriate for your implementation or you have custom functionality that is beyond the scope of the product, we supply a component builder, built in OpenScript, that reads our meta data and generates a service based definition which can be loaded into the already provided library of components. We also ship a component verifier, built in OpenScript, that helps ensure that your generated components are still valid when you make administration or configuration data changes.
- The service layer in the product is common across ALL channels (i.e. online, web services, batch and mobile). All the business logic and rules are stored, verified at that layer and applied regardless of channel used. There are no business rules in the user interface in the base product. There are usability features that look like rules to improve usability of the product but they are NOT business rules.
- The service layer encapsulates all the business rules and validations. This greatly simplifies testing as the testing tool just needs to interface to the layer to take advantage of those rules. Just like any channel when a business rule is broken then the product will respond with an appropriate message (the same message as the online user would get). The testing tool will recognize these error conditions.
- This solution separates usability testing (which is typically done manually to assess the screen for usability) versus verifying your functionality in the product against your business processes and your data. Assessment of screens for usability is best performed by a person in your organization that will assess the usability of the screen.
Now, we also understand that some implementations may of introduced business rules into your user interface for various reasons. While this is not ideal, as you will be missing those business rules in non-user interface based interfaces, you can use the power of the Oracle Application Testing Suite to record a user interface based component. That component can be mixed with the service based components to incorporate into a flow.
The service based approach is different to the user interface based approach used in a lot of other tools but we feel it is the most efficient means of testing your product implementation and upgrade both quickly and easily.