Recently I attended the customer forums in London, to discuss the future of our product lines and also outline the work we have done over the last year. One of the questions that came up was the a discussion of the major advantages of using the Oracle Functional Testing Advanced Pack for Oracle Utilities which is part of the Oracle Testing solution.
In the industry, functional testing, in an initial implementation and the subsequent upgrades of any product, is a major part of the implementation. Typically to reduce risk, implementations commonly decide to reduce the scope of testing, to meet deadlines, which increases the overall risk.
One way of addressing this is to adopt automated testing. While this sounds logical it can have hidden costs:
- Traditional tools use user interface based scripting which basically records the screen and the interaction of the screen. In the old days in my career, I used to call this screen scraping. I am sure it is more than that, effectively it is using the screen recording, including the data entered, as a rerunnable test.
- Typically, data that is entered in the recording is embedded in the script used for recording. This means if you wanted to reuse the script you would probably need to record it again or have some programming resource to change the script. Effectively you need a specialist script programmer to maintain the testing assets for you.
- If the user experience changes, even due to a patch, the script may or may not work as originally intended which may return inconsistent results or you will need to re-record the asset again. This is more likely when you upgrade as new modern user experiences are introduced over time.
- Testing assets are really programmable objects that are typically maintained by a programmer rather than a testing resource. Whilst, these programming languages are made easier and easier to use they are still programming.
Now, whilst it is possible to use the Oracle Application Testing Suite in the traditional sense as outlined above, when it is coupled with the Oracle Functional Testing Advanced Pack for Oracle Utilities it is much different and addresses the issues seen in a traditional automated testing approach.
- Oracle Functional Testing Advanced Pack for Oracle Utilities includes a full set of reusable components that are the SAME components used by the QA teams at Oracle on a day to day basis. The fact they are used on a daily basis by the product QA, reduces the risk of them actually executing and being able to be used against the product versions.
- The solution is based upon Oracle Application Testing Suite which is used by hundreds of Oracle customers across many Oracle products such as eBusiness Suite, Peoplesoft, Fusion, JD Edwards etc. Oracle Utilities is just one of the latest products to use the Oracle Application Testing Suite. In fact, some of the products have licensed packs as well that can be used with in conjunction with the Oracle Utilities pack.
- The components represent the full functions of the main functionality of the product they are supplied for. The only components we do not provide are the components that cover the administration objects. These objects are typically not cost effective to automate in an implementation, due to their very low usage after implementation.
- The supplied components are customization aware where algorithms, change handlers, etc are handled by the component automatically.
- The Oracle Functional Testing Advanced Pack for Oracle Utilities supplies a number of utilities to allow partners and implementations to add custom components to the solution for any customization not handled by the base components (this should be relatively rare).
- The process to use the pack with the Oracle Application Testing suite is more assembly (orchestration) rather than programming. Oracle Flow Builder, which is included in the solution, is a simple browser based too that allows business processes to be modeled with simple drag and drop of the components in the order they represent the business process. This allows a lower skilled person to build the flows rather than a programmer.
- The testing flows becomes a test script through a generator. The resulting script does not need to be altered or maintained by a developer after it is generated.
- Data for the flow is independent of the flow which encourages reuse. For example, it is possible to attach different data to represent different scenarios to a single flow. Flows can also contain multiple scenarios if desired. This extends even after the flow is expressed a test script where the physical data is separated out so it can be replaced at runtime rather than design time.
- The whole solution is designed for reuse so that the number of assets you need is actually far less than traditional methods. This reduces costs and risk.
- It is possible to reuse your flows across product versions. For example, it is possible to test multiple releases of products to reduce your upgrade risk by aligning the same flows to different versions of the supplied components.
The testing solution from Oracle Utilities is far more cost effective than traditional methods with the content allowing implementations to quickly adopt automated testing with a lower implementation risk. Customers who have used the solution have found they have tested more, reduced their testing costs and increased accuracy of their solutions.