by Tyler Price

In June, the Quest Oracle Cloud Community hosted a variety of webinars for Oracle customers and partners. The focus was specific to Oracle’s Cloud Apps Suite, and the topics ranged from implementing your Oracle Cloud Application, all the way to managing Oracle’s quarterly updates. To say that the sessions were educational and informative would be an understatement. The Cloud Apps Week topics represented conversations we have with our customers regularly.

Each session was valuable, and all of the presenters were excellent, however, one session stood out for me; ‘Managing Oracle Updates in the Cloud by ERP Cloud SIG’, hosted by Sue Shaw, BSc.

Now to be transparent, here at DWS, we are a provider of Oracle Fusion Cloud App and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne products and services. One of our products, Dimension SwiftTest, helps organizations reduce the time and effort of their functional testing processes.

Sue brought a wealth of knowledge and experience from her time as an IT Leader, Strategic Advisor, and all around ERP and Cloud Application expert. As someone who has worked for Oracle in the Cloud Apps, and now supports our Dimension SwiftTest customers – I’m always excited to hear about the experience of end-users and those tasked with managing their organization’s enterprise applications. During the presentation, Sue had a few quotes that stuck out as they hit the challenge of quarterly update testing on the head.

“Whatever you may be told, you still have to manage your complex enterprise system, which in this case is an ERP, as you do with all other systems.”

If an organization moves to an Oracle Fusion Cloud Application, it is likely done with the intention of continuous innovation, and maximizing the value of the system for their users. Updates are meant to provide access to new technology and functionality– however, these updates or changes in your system highlight the need to test your application.

“You need to know what is going on in your environment because of course, change is a risk and it could cause a problem for your company.”

For the folks that have been accustomed to on premise solutions, “It does take a little bit of a mind-shift to think what is essentially a little, mini upgrade each quarter – the positive side of this is there are no more monolithic updates, so when you used to go 5, 6, or even 10 years without updating your ERP, you are now always up to date.”

While this should be seen as a positive, teams tasked with managing application updates are challenged with researching the updates, deciding which the organization would like to turn on, and perform the necessary regression testing all in a two-week window. Most of the time, this will mean one week to test and another week to find a workaround.

Listening to Sue Shaw speak about her experience leading teams with cloud and on premise applications was a great education on the challenges that IT and Enterprise Application teams face today. Quest offers a recording of the webinar for members, if you have access, I highly recommend listening in.

If you would like to learn how we help with functional testing, we would love to hear from you.