Oracle is delighted to announce the release of the Oracle Utilities Testing Accelerator (UTA), known as Version 6.0.0.2.0, is now available for licensed customers to use. This release is significant as it is considered a foundation release for customers who wish to use the upcoming Utilities Reference Model (URM) content. This release realizes one of the major goals of the Utilities Testing Accelerator by providing reusable content with the tool to greatly reduce risk and costs of implementing Oracle Utilities products. This also contrasts the premise of traditional automation tools where the risk and cost is still with the testers on building and maintaining content.
This release contains the following major enhancements:
- Foundation Release. This release is required as a minimum for customers considering to use the Oracle Utilities Reference Model UTA content packs. It is highly recommended that UTA customers upgrade to this release prior to using the Oracle Utilities Reference Model content. A subset of this pack is shown below:
Note: The Utilities Reference Model content will not work on older versions of the Oracle Utilities Testing Accelerator. The initial release of the Oracle Utilities Reference Model pack is targeted at Oracle Utilities SaaS Cloud Services only. In subsequent releases of the pack other variations, including on-premise releases, will be supported.
- Flow Test Data Set Support. In prior releases, it was possible to associate test data set content with individual components within a flow for reuse. In this release, test data sets can be associated as a flow data set that is associated with flows. Once established, the flow test data sets can be managed and used as a set at anytime. This reduces data management at a flow level and promotes reuse. This is a foundation feature for the upcoming test planning capabilities planned in future releases. For example:
For more information about Flow Test Data Sets, refer to Flow Subroutines and Test Data Sets (Doc Id: 2632033.1) available from My Oracle Support.
- Iterative Flow Support. In some test scenarios, multiple flow executions are needed to populate enough data for additional tests. In this release, it now possible at the Flow Group level to iterate a flow using different data banks to populate data in a single execution event. This capability is used in association with Flow Set Support to easily target relevant data with each iteration. For example:
- Flow Subroutine Support. To promote reuse, it is now possible to include a flow within a flow, in a similar method to components. This allows flows to model specific micro-level business processes and then incorporated into longer duration process to reduce testing costs and encourage reuse. Customers familiar with Oracle Application Testing Suite might remember Component Groups that had similar concepts. Oracle Utilities Testing Accelerator does not support Component Groups as we wanted to take advantage of the concepts and capabilities of the flows rather than groups of components. For example, flows can act as standalone and/or subroutines and can be independently executed. The Oracle Utilities Reference Model content fully exploits this capability. This allows implementation to treat a flow as a subroutine with a configurable Subroutine Interface uniquely on each reuse. This means that Flows can be standalone and/or reused wherever appropriate with a configurable interface to maximize reuse. For example:
For more information about Flow Subroutines, refer to Flow Subroutines and Test Data Sets (Doc Id: 2632033.1) available from My Oracle Support.
- Improvements to the User Experience. With each release of the product, the user interface is improved based upon feedback from existing customers and in direction of our UX design team. In this release the following has been updated:
- Updated Oracle Jet Library. The rendering engine and libraries used for the product have been updated to the latest Oracle Jet release to offer greater browser compatibility, to address user experience inconsistencies and offer new capabilities.
- Dynamic Zone Sizing. To support a wider range of form factors the user zones can by dynamically resized at run-time.
- Zone Hiding Support. To maximize the effectiveness of the flow and component maintenance, it is now possible to hide the flow/component tree zones to maximize the canvas.
- Improved Error Messages. As part of the standardization, messages from the product are progressively migrated to a new panel style interface. For example:
- Inbuilt Purge Capability. With the inclusion of additional data capabilities such as test data sets at component and flow level as well as results for all executions, data retention needs to be managed. This release includes a generic purge capability for test data sets and execution information to keep the database manageable. This is the first in a series of inbuilt data management capabilities planned for the product. For example:
- Improved Categorization of Flows. With the introduction of the new capabilities and the Utilities Reference Model the module system has been extended to allow users to manage their own modules to aid in organization of test assets. A Default module is now shipped with all packs to act as a default capability. In this release the implementation of flow modules has been restricted to a single level. This is planned to be expanded in future releases. For example:
- Improved Email Results Component. For backward compatibility, Oracle Utilities Testing Accelerator supplied an optional component to email a summary of the results. In this release this component has been altered to provide additional information in the email including performance metrics, request payload and response payload. Use of this component is optional as all this information is also available from the results section of the Oracle Utilities Testing Accelerator Workbench and the associated optional eclipse plugin.
- Improved Results Reporting. The results user experience has been revampled in anticipation of the planned Test Planning capabilities in future releases. This interface makes the results easier to understand with more summary screens to save the need to look into details. For example:
There are additional enhancements and fixes from previous versions of the product. For a full list refer to the provided documentation.
For on-premise customers this release will be available from Oracle Software Delivery Cloud and cloud customers will receive this release and content automatically as scheduled. Content Packs are available on-premise customers via My Oracle Support.
For more information about Oracle Utilities Testing Accelerator, refer to Oracle Utilities Testing Accelerator Overview (Doc Id: 2014163.1) from My Oracle Support which includes an overview and a Frequently Asked Questions.