No-code Process Discovery and Test Automation

Why is Automation a Necessity for Testing Oracle Applications?

Manual testing was the norm until a few years ago. As the width and depth of business applications increase, the necessity to test them efficiently becomes prominent. Manual testing can’t keep up with this growing demand.

Manual testing is slow, error-prone, tedious, and counter-productive. The results – poor quality, slow and inconsistent results, and lower team productivity. A CISQ report1 shows that the cost of poor quality software in the US in 2020 was approximately $2.8 trillion. Getting one level deeper – if fixing a bug in the development phase costs $100, the same bug costs $10,000 to be fixed in production.

The Inefficiencies of Manual Testing

Agile teams often consider manual testing as the primary bottleneck to faster delivery due to the challenges it poses:

1. Incomplete test coverage
With applications growing at the light’s speed, it gets tricky to test every functionality manually. This results in untested features and, in turn, insufficient test coverage, which lowers the team’s confidence. Not to mention the strain it puts on testing teams to squeeze their QA efforts into a 3–4 week sprint.

2. Technical debt
Each sprint has some residual issues from the previous sprint that impact the current timelines. If your testing methodology is manual, this technical debt exists, affecting the overall delivery timeline.

3. Delayed releases
From trying to achieve end-to-end testing to accommodating regression tests in agile sprints, manual testing usually causes some delay in releases.

Test automation helps you overcome these challenges. It promises higher quality, faster delivery, lowers technical debt to near-zero, and proves cost-effective if implemented strategically.

What are the Specific Challenges of Testing Oracle Applications

Frequent updates and patches
Oracle applications are synonymous with regular updates. These updates are a result of market demands or business strategy changes. Oracle apps should be tested frequently and faster to ensure these updates are up and running in no time. Manual testing can’t catch up on speed, making test automation necessary.

Customizations
Oracle applications are customizable to meet the unique demands of each business. Thus, the more customizations, the greater the testing effort involved since the risk of breakage is high. Only automation can help teams test every possible scenario without bogging down your team’s productivity.

Numerous integrations
Since Oracle applications rarely exist in siloes and involve diverse integrations, testing all the crucial integration points is tricky without test automation. When done manually, it is nearly impossible to test the entire breadth of the business process in lesser time and limited resources.

Migration from EBS to Cloud
While this topic deserves an elaborate explanation of its own, it doesn’t hurt to consider it as one of the primary reasons why Oracle apps need test automation. Testing Oracle migration entails more than just one successful User Acceptance Testing cycle. Without continuous testing, teams can’t mitigate risks, avoid roll-backs, or give faster feedback to dev teams.

Why are Current Automation Solutions Losing Steam?

A survey by TechWell indicates that the widespread adoption of test automation still has a long way to go, as 75% of the respondents automate less than 50% of their testing. The same survey also reveals that 47% of the respondents use a combination of open source and commercial tools. 36% use open-source tools exclusively, and a mere 8% use commercial tools exclusively.

These numbers suggest that open-source tools still play a significant role in testing teams. Tools like Selenium transformed the QA automation space in the last few years. It is free, open-source, and has a large community of users. Fast-forward a few years, the emergence of low-code automation tools empowered teams with customizations, improved support, and more.

However, in both cases, the following challenges failed to keep the true promise of automation:

What Should a Test Automation Solution Ideally Offer?

With various test automation solutions in the market, it could get tricky to choose the one that suits your requirement best. Here are a few capabilities to look out for.

No-code
A no-code test automation solution empowers you to test applications with a few clicks of the buttons or without having to write a single line of code. It saves time and effort in scripting and helps expedite testing. Additionally, it shortens the learning curve and speeds up the solution’s adoption.
Most importantly, it lets a broader group, including software developers, QA specialists, and business analysts, participate in testing. It bridges the prevailing gap between IT and business, helping them collaborate better. This translates to faster feedback between teams, better software, and exceptional business outcomes.

Heterogeneous
When a solution is heterogeneous, your test automation isn’t limited to web applications. A cross-compatible solution allows you to test web, Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, mobile, mainframes, and more. This way, you can test an entire business process from start to finish using one single solution, improving automation coverage. Added perks – you save the effort and time involved in downloading, installing, and maintaining individual plugins.

Intelligent reporting
The importance of well-interpreted data cannot be emphasized enough. The same goes for comprehensive and intuitive reporting. If a report helps you pinpoint a bug without looking more in-depth, it saves you time and helps fix the issue on the fly without interrupting the business.

Smart Scheduling
Your solution should allow you to execute multiple scenarios in a single VM independently or in parallel. Especially in the case of regression testing, this provides multitasking and saves time.

Integration with CI/CD Pipeline
Rapid development, testing, and deployment of new software contribute to a significant part of continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD). Test automation solutions should be an integral part of this CI/CD pipeline to ensure the quality of applications isn’t compromised for speed.

24/7 Support
Be it helping you get started with the solution or cushioning you through major setbacks while testing, a support team’s availability round the clock is crucial.

How Does No-Code Process Discovery Simplify Test Automation?

Optimizing business processes before testing them is one of the primary objectives of enterprises. It improves cost-effectiveness and efficiency. The fundamental requirement is to know and understand a process to optimize it. Process documentation, when done manually, is cumbersome and takes weeks or even months to document one single enterprise business process.

A Gartner report claims that more than 80% of companies still depend on manual process mapping and spend 65% of their time re-documenting steps rather than optimizing the process.

A no-code process discovery solution saves time and effort. What took weeks or months now takes a few hours or days. With all your documenting efforts reduced to a few buttons clicks, your team now has more time and capacity to optimize the processes.

When you test these processes with a no-code test automation solution, the outcome is higher-quality, efficient applications.

How Does Avo Offer Unique Benefits?

Avo’s no-code process discovery and test automation solutions empower the largest Fortune 500 companies to reimagine quality assurance.

With Avo Discover, you can rapidly capture, document, and modify end-to-end business processes, enabling the team to optimize them. With its intelligent, no-code, and heterogeneous capabilities, Avo Assure helps teams achieve end-to-end test automation. The best thing – both Avo Discover and Avo Assure work in unison or individually to help you get the most out of your applications.

With our no-code automation suite, enterprises have achieved the following milestones:

• Expand test automation coverage to >90% by executing end-to-end tests for diverse applications, including Oracle
• Reduce defect injection rate in production to less than 2%
• Deliver high-quality applications at least 3x faster
• Achieve more than 40% cost savings
• Increase employee capacity for innovation by saving 85% of the manual testing effort
• Be 2x more productive
• Leverage over 1500 keywords and reduce testing time
• Save over 45% of your regression testing effort