To keep pace with constantly evolving business requirements brought by market dynamics, competitive pressures and business turbulence, enterprises across the globe are migrating to cloud ERP solutions. They are developed on the commitment of continuous innovation to make enterprises more responsive and agile to changing business needs.
As a part of their commitment towards continuous innovation, major ERP vendors rolls out continuous updates. Oracle rolls out quarterly updates, Dynamics 365 rolls out two major updates (Wave 1 and Wave 2) yearly, Salesforce rolls out updates thrice a year, Veeva on quarterly basis, SAP two to three times a year and the list goes on.
Since these updates have the potential to disrupt your existing business processes, testing needs to be done prior to deploying these updates into production. However, enterprises that are still leveraging manual testing approaches are struggling to keep pace with the frequency of updates. To gain required pace with ERP updates, enterprises need to bring in test automation. In this article, we’ll discuss why you should move from manual to automated testing and how test automation will benefit you.
- Keep pace with frequent releases
The way enterprises consume ERP has been changed dramatically. With this, the disruptive updates that once rolled out in three to five years are now been released on a much more regular basis. For instance, Oracle Cloud receives quarterly updates and Salesforce thrice a year. Manually testing cloud ERP updates is no more a viable solution since QA teams might not been able to keep pace with updates. Oracle Cloud requires two rounds of testing. Manually executing Oracle Cloud testing at least 4 times/year with each update requiring two round of regression testing can be very challenging.
Test automation is inherently useful for repeated cases. It means it is perfect for regression testing of Oracle, Salesforce, and ERP solutions. Test automation significantly increases the speed of test execution by automating some of the repetitive — but necessary — tasks used in regression testing.
- Scalability & Stability
Manual testing isn’t about repeating things again and again. However, ERP applications are complex and test suites grow with time. As tests grow, regression testing becomes more complicated. The only way to scale manual testing is to incorporate more people and allocate them more hours. As far as stability of tests is concerned, it requires lot of efforts.
Test automation offers great degree of scalability as you need to incorporate more agents to execute tests. Test stability can be a concern in test automation if you want regression testing of enterprise apps like Oracle. If test automation scripts are static, then change in dynamic elements will not be incorporated, leading to test failures, flaky/brittle tests, or build failures. So, always opt for Oracle test automation platform that comes with self-healing capabilities to incorporate changes autonomously.
- Adequate risk coverage
Manual testing lacks the ability to ensure complete risk coverage. The reason for this is the involvement of human element. Testers either use their experience to create test scenarios or use “guesses” on how users are interacting with the application. Due to this, most impacted areas are left from testing, exposing your business to unnecessary risks. At times, manual testing remains limited to minimum sets of environments such as browsers, resolutions, devices, and OSs.
Test automation protects your business from unnecessary risks. Most test automation platforms offer “risk-based coverage” in which highly impacted areas of your business such as vital reports, key workflow approvals, and critical integrations with third party applications are tested.
Summing up
Enterprises need to understand that test automation offer speed, adequate coverage, & accuracy that they have been looking for to keep pace with rapidly changing market dynamics. However, the benefits of test automation will be witnessed in long term.
