Interesting #TestAutomation requirement in spite of no changes in Oracle EBS Application

Recently I had visited a customer for doing a POC, task was to automate one end to end scenario in Oracle EBS Application along with Web Services (SOA & RESTFUL) . There were internal and third party applications which are integrated to their Oracle EBS Application.

Problem statement:

To speed up release of software products to market with no room for error in the entire process of placing the order to process the order, with all integrations working intact.

Note: They were well aware that #TestAutomation will be the best possibility to reduce the current cycle of testing and be able to decide early on Go / No-Go for their product to market.

My agenda for this #TestAutomation POC:

a. Automate an end to end scenario covering different integrations, with our existing automation framework of Oracle Application Testing Suite ( OFT )

b. Share benefits of our existing framework apart from what OFT provides by default.

c. How soon / quick we can automate stable scripts irrespective of the kind of requirement.

d. Demo the execution of end to end scenario.

e. Understand if there are any special requirements for them and let them know if they are worth having? provide any better solutions for their requirement and by when we can be ready to start delivering the project.

Whenever I visit a customer location and get more details about their business, I generally try to learn something new, similarly I had learnt something new in the current engagement as well, which I would be sharing it in due course of this article.

Surprisingly:

a. They do not make any changes in Oracle EBS application.

b. They do not apply patches.

c. They test almost 12 months every year.

d. No upgrade on Oracle EBS application for years together.

Initially I was surprised as why do they really test for so many times every year, I wanted to capture those details in the process of finishing the #TestAutomation POC for them.

They initially planned for 1 week POC, due to lot of complexity in the integration between web services and oracle ebs applications, fortunately could finish it in 3 days, as follows:

Day 1: Getting entry in to office, creation of Cisco VPN account along with token ID, gathered all instance urls and credentials to check if I was able to login or not, met people with whom I would be interacting during the #TestAutomation POC.

Day 2: Got transition on end to end scenario, explanation of web service calls, gathered test data and dependencies across different integrated applications, I had to do couple of manual end to end dry runs to make sure I am aware of the entire flow and not to disturb the internal team members, as they will be busy in their regular tasks. Finally started with #TestAutomation of the script.

Day 3: Completed creation of #TestAutomation script using our scalable and extendable framework, Gave live demo in a conference room to the stakeholders, decision makers and influencers on the shared end to end business scenario. Articulated the benefits and speed of development, stability in the scripts and how easy are they to tweak for any future requirements.

While I was doing the POC, I tried to capture their need to test, though they do not make any changes in Oracle EBS application, they release new products quite regularly and before publishing them to production, they have to test all business scenarios thoroughly.

No room for error to publish their products i.e. not to unearth any surprising functional errors and also make sure the end users "User eXperience" is great when doing business with them.

As part of this testing process, they replicate the production with all other integrations of internal and third party applications, push the new product details, configurations and required data setups etc.. and test them thoroughly on all possible scenarios of business and make sure everything is working fine, once they get the confidence on this, they would publish the product to market.

Currently they spend 2.5 to 3 weeks on testing the scenarios manually to make sure everything is working fine, and now with #TestAutomation in place they can decide in max 2 to 2.5 working days and can arrive at a GO / No-GO decision.

I was glad to be part of this engagement and learn something new out of it :) I hope you had learnt something from this article.

I appreciate if you could share your views or similar kind of experiences or any of such surprising facts and need for testing / test automation, this can bring enlightenment to all business users, automation experts, etc...

In case you have any #TestAutomation requirement be it be any ERP or Third party applications or mobile applications or integrated complex application landscape, you can reach out to me on my linkedin profile.