Organizations today face significant pressure to accelerate software release cycles for business-critical platforms, such as Oracle. However, application modernization projects, such as migrating to Oracle Cloud, often face delays and budget overruns due to legacy quality assurance (QA) practices, which are usually manual, resource-intensive, and inefficient.
A recent study, commissioned by Tricentis, examined how modern AI-powered QA platforms can address these challenges for Oracle applications. It analyzed the benefits, costs, and risks based on interviews with organizations experienced with Tricentis solutions.
Challenges of Legacy Oracle Testing
Before implementing a modern testing solution, these organizations struggled with several common challenges. They included:
- Slow manual and legacy testing processes, with testing cycles lasting up to 12 weeks to complete. For one utilities organization, the manual execution of over 300 test cases took over 350 hours.
- Older automated testing tools required testers to have developer-level skills to write and maintain complex scripts. This increased the cost and complexity of the testing team. In fact, one test case would be worked on by two or three people and could take up to a week.
- Limited scope and poor reusability, leading to the duplication of test scripts and inflated test suites.
A Modern Approach
However, after adopting Tricentis qTest for test management and Tricentis Tosca for continuous testing, the organizations realized significant improvements. These solutions leverage automation and AI to improve QA testing for Oracle applications.
The study’s financial analysis aggregated a return on investment (ROI) of 372% and a net present value (NPV) of $6.3 million, with a payback period of less than six months. Some of the other benefits quantified by the study included:
- Accelerated testing at reduced cost: Tosca’s model-based, codeless automation enabled organizations to expand test coverage to 90% which drastically reduced testing time. One of the firms interviewed for the study cut its regression testing window from eight weeks to 14 days. This acceleration, combined with decommissioning a legacy tool and optimizing resources, resulted in a total testing cost reduction of nearly 40%, valued at over $1.3 million.
- Increased business value from higher test frequency: The efficiency gains allowed testing cycles to shrink by 67%, tripling the prior testing frequency. Delivering releases to end users more quickly resulted in productivity gains of $6.2 million.
- Efficient upgrade cycles: Using qTest as a centralized repository, organizations could reuse 750 test cases during a major Oracle application upgrade. This eliminated duplication, saving an estimated $484,000.
The study concluded that by implementing an AI-powered, continuous testing platform, organizations can effectively modernize their QA practices for Oracle applications.
Building on these findings, Tricentis will showcase its cutting-edge AI and automated testing solutions at Oracle AI World from October 13 to 16 in Las Vegas.
What This Means for ERP Insiders
- De-risk and accelerate major transformations, such as cloud migrations, with AI. Migrating Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) from on-premises to Oracle Cloud Applications is a critical project where testing delays can impact timelines and budgets. A modernized testing approach directly supports these transformations. For example, faster regression cycles enable quicker validation of cloud-deployed patches and updates. Moreover, the ability to automate integration testing ensures continuity across hybrid systems during phased migrations, and test case reusability reduces duplicative work across the on-premises and new cloud environments. As a result, ERP teams can identify and resolve issues faster, keep the project on schedule, and ensure that new cloud configurations and integrations are thoroughly vetted before go-live.
- Accelerate testing with automated tools like Tricentis Tosca. A primary bottleneck in Oracle ERP projects is the time it takes to run QA tests. This slow pace directly delays the release of crucial updates, patches, and new functionality. However, solutions like Tricentis Tosca enable organizations to accelerate these testing times as the study showed. This means that ERP teams can shift from a quarterly or semi-annual release cadence to a monthly one, delivering value to the business much faster and ensuring the timely deployment of security patches to stay compliant with SLAs.
- Automating QA tools frees up resources. Legacy tools often require specialized developers to write and manage code-based scripts, which is a time-consuming and expensive process. However, Tosca’s codeless, model-based approach fundamentally changes this dynamic, as one person can now build the same test case that previously took a team a week to create in just a few hours. Maintenance is also faster due to the high reusability of test blocks. Thus, automation frees up expensive developer resources from tedious scripting, allowing them to focus on higher-value activities, such as migration-critical tasks or building new features.
Get a demo or watch a product tour to start modernizing your Oracle Application testing strategy.
