1. Regular Cloud App Updates

Oracle has a suite of cloud apps and software applications that broadly span categories such as Customer Relationship Management, Human Capital Management, Enterprise Resource Planning, and Supply Chain Management.

These applications are tailored to meet specific business needs and have short update cycles. The updates deliver new functionality, features, performance improvements, and bug fixes to improve cloud performance and boost business outcomes.

For testers, this means that they must:

However, conducting regression testing quarterly across the cloud application suite, while preserving customizations, poses significant challenges. The process becomes notably effort-intensive and time-draining for testing teams, especially in the absence of test automation.

2. Ensuring the Testing of Essential Procedures

The Oracle Cloud's applications are inherently dynamic, lacking fixed attributes such as IDs, names, CSS selectors, and iFrames. Testers have to make sure that they are testing all the essential procedures and performing end-to-end testing.

However, new feature updates can potentially interfere with established business processes. Consequently, it becomes essential for testers to complete testing all essential procedures within a two-week window post-release.

It is imperative that testers identify all the essential procedures and carefully determine which business process to test within the stipulated time of two weeks. Unless all essential processes are tested, they stand a chance to fail.

3. Performance Bottlenecks

Identifying and addressing performance bottlenecks are essential to ensure scalability, quick response times, throughput, and resource utilization. However, applications must be tested thoroughly under several loads and conditions.

Identifying these performance bottlenecks can often become time-consuming in the absence of skilled resources owing to dynamic objects, extreme customizations, and other complexities.

4. Requirement for Technical Expertise

Given the robust update environment, testing the Oracle Cloud demands significant testing expertise. The object-heavy applications, dynamic resources, and customizations need testing knowledge.

Moreover, testers need to conduct rigorous functional and technical analyses of each new functionality. They also need to account for the thousands of customizations in place and ensure that every scenario is thoroughly tested within a short timeframe. However, the limited time and resources can impact testing outcomes and application quality and output.

5. Security and Compatibility

Testing security controls, access and authentication controls and procedures, and data encryption are essential. Apart from that, testers need to conduct vulnerability assessments and penetration testing to unearth and fix security issues.

Along with this, it is imperative to check that the Oracle databases interface with a wide range of applications, operating systems, and hardware configurations. Testing these and ensuring they are compatible and work flawlessly across environments and components is important.

6. Maximizing Test Coverage

Maximizing test coverage becomes a challenge for testers, given the undefined testing scope of the Oracle Cloud. The tight two-week window for testing and implementing Oracle's updates further complicates the endeavor to broaden test coverage.

It's here that accelerating testing velocity becomes critical. It can significantly contribute to maximizing test coverage and ensuring that every application aspect works as intended.

7. Effective Test Data Management

Navigating the test data challenge is crucial to ensure robust testing. However, getting the right test data is difficult for most testers.

For effective test data management, testers have to:

8. The Need for Production Environment Updates

Along with rigorous application testing, the production environment necessitates periodic updates. However, doing this four times a year can cause significant challenges and inflate testing costs considerably.

9. Disaster Recovery and Backup

Given the importance of the Oracle Cloud in defining business outcomes, it becomes essential to have a robust disaster recovery and backup in case of unexpected events or system failures.

Testers, as such, must not only plan for testing the applications but also define backup and recovery methods that include disaster recovery plans. Testing these ensures that the system can be restored with minimal downtime.

10. Regulatory Compliance

Testers also need to ensure that the Oracle cloud complies with regulations and standards such as data protection legislation (e.g., GDPR) or industry-specific rules (e.g., HIPAA for healthcare) based on their sector and geographical area.