In today’s agile world, cloud migration and adoption has become a strategic move to stay ahead in the competition. As more organisations are embracing the cloud due to low cost, scalability, collaboration, and flexibility, the requirement of continuous testing and validation has altered from “nice to have” to “absolutely necessity”. With the commencement of cloud, the way of “consuming” the enterprise software has changed dramatically. Previously, major/ disruptive ERP upgrade was rolled out once in three to five years. But for now, software updates are rolled out and deployed on more regular basis.
As a part of continuous innovation initiative, major digital transformation facilitators like Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, & Salesforce are releasing software updates on more frequent basis. Enterprise software vendors are releasing major updates on monthly, quarterly, or biannually basis. Due to this, organisations are struggling to keep pace with the frequency and breadth of the software updates. Since software updates consist of new functionality, features, bug fixes, & customer enhancements, these need to be tested rigorously prior to deployment in the production. That’s the reason why ERP software testing like Salesforce testing, SAP testing, Oracle Cloud testing etc is the need of the hour.
Why ERP Testing & Release is a Necessity
Since software updates can impact a variety of functionalities which may cause business disruption, it is recommended organisations should perform regression testing of all their critical business processes. ERP is a complex system that can be customised or integrated with range of applications to cater to unique business processes. Even a slight change in the code can influence the customisation and integration. So, organisations need to validate their critical business processes, workflows, reports and integrations prior to deploying updates in the production.
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Use Case 1: Oracle Fusion Cloud
In case of Oracle Cloud Applications, new updates are rolled out every quarter. Firstly, these updates are introduced in non-production environments. After two weeks, these are applied to Production. There should not be alternation in this schedule unless customer specifically discussed issues with Oracle and get approval for the rescheduling. So, customers get two weeks tome to test their Oracle cloud applications, analyse the results, and raise issues.
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Use Case 2: Salesforce
As a constantly evolving platform, Salesforce offers three release per year i.e. winter, spring, & summer. These releases consists of bug fixes, new features and functionalities that improve performance and usability. Salesforce offers an opt-in period during which organisations can test the updates to understand whether or not the updates have affected the custom code. However, customers need to understand that the opt-in period doesn’t last forever in Salesforce.
Why Manual testing not a viable approach
Though manual testing approach is still prevalent, it is not considered as a reliable solution. In this disruptive time, when much faster and more frequent testing is required, manual testing cannot help you in keeping pace with digital transformation. Not only manual testing approach is error prone, fragile and costly but also time consuming and limited. Furthermore, you would struggle to achieve the required levels of testing speed and accuracy. Apart from wasting several days, manual testing can negatively impact business continuity due to limited testing coverage and limitations to identify patterns impacting the performance of critical business processes. In a scenario when vendors are rolling out updates frequently, manual testing approach holds you back from innovation.
Test automation can accelerate digital transformation
With test automation helps organisations can bring continuous and innovative changes to ERP systems while ensuring software quality. Automation testing enables organisations to easily validate the performance of mission critical business processes. One of the biggest advantages of automated testing is that it ensures maximum accuracy by ensuring quick feedback, wider test coverage and accelerated results. By embracing test automation, organisations can streamline and accelerate release management and upgrade test cycles while limiting costs and test scripts maintenance.
In case of frequent release cycles from ERP testing vendors, customers can rigorously test their applications within stipulated time frame prior to deployment in the production. Leveraging automated testing, QA teams can easily perform the functional and technical analysis of each release to know its impact on workflows and business processes. Test automation significantly reduces the time required in the completion of each transaction while highlighting the areas which are most impacted by the release. Based on impact assessment, QA teams can perform risk-based testing of applications to deliver broader coverage.
Conclusion
In this era of agile, automation testing helps organisations to increase the scope and frequency of tests. By reducing testing time and efforts, automation helps organisations to deliver faster and more affordably while bringing down the costs significantly.
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