[Editor: A follow-up article with corrections and additional information has been posted here]
Quality Assurance: everybody’s favourite whipping boy. As I mentioned in my Blue Bridge of Death article, there exists an infinite number of testing scenarios that must somehow be covered by a limited amount of resources. The best solution is to automate as many tests as possible.
Internally here in E-Business Suite Development, we use Mercury WinRunner to create automated regression tests for each 11.5.x release. We’ve been using this tool for years — it’s extremely effective. Passing all automated regression tests is a mandatory exit criteria for all product teams for all releases.
There’s an up-front investment cost to create the testing scripts, and there are ongoing costs to maintain them as screens and user flows change. The benefits far outweigh the costs.
WinRunner is used to create an automatic testing script, which can then be repeated as many times as you’d like using Mercury LoadRunner. [Editor: Correction — WinRunner and LoadRunner are not integrated; see this follow-up article]
LoadRunner can be used to simulate hundreds of simultaneous users on your system. This is particularly useful for testing whether load-balancers are routing traffic correctly, or whether database traffic is automatically being rerouted between RAC nodes in failover conditions. Our Performance Group uses LoadRunner for scalability testing, performance benchmarking, and trapping those notoriously hard-to-find JVM memory leaks.
Using Oracle’s Regression Tests in Your Environment
The entire suite of regression tests that we use to test every E-Business Suite release is available for download from Metalink. These tests represent millions of dollars worth of development time, and I’m personally amazed that they’re available for free.
We call this a Test Starter Kit since you’ll need to customize the scripts for your specific purposes. You might find the investment in training and development to be costly, but having your own battery of automated tests can potentially ease the anxiety around applying big Apps patches. Worth a look if you’re considering new options for streamlining your Apps upgrade and QA process.
Reference:
- Test Starter Kit Information Center (Note 239746.1)