With premier support for Oracle Hyperion 11.1.2.4 is going to end in December 2021, enterprises across the globe are looking to migrate to Oracle EPM Cloud. Apart from several other benefits, one major advantage that enterprises will gain from Hyperion is introduction of the “Continuous Innovation”. Like EBS (Enterprise Business Suite), Oracle rolls out continuous updates for Hyperion EPM 11.2. Undoubtedly, Oracle EPM cloud offers numerous benefits to enterprises, however, they come at a cost. To ensure that post migration, Oracle EPM Cloud Apps work seamlessly to support your business processes, you need test focussed migration strategy. Furthermore, continuous testing is also needed to keep pace with EPM cloud frequent updates. That’s the reason organisations are focusing on building strategies fororacle testing , but before that let’s analyse the challenges in oracle cloud migration.
Challenges in Oracle EPM Cloud Migration
- The biggest challenge during Oracle EPM Cloud migration is change impact assessment. Since your infrastructure is changing 100%, they might be a possibility that your existing customizations don’t work in the new environment. Over the years, many enterprises have customized their on-prem EPM instance. Since EPM cloud supports configurations, there are chances that most customizations don’t work in the new EPM cloud environment. Moreover, enterprises will miss out on having full access to their environment as well as a vast number of customization capabilities.
- Over the years, many enterprises have integrated their on-prem Oracle Hyperion with productivity tools such as BI tools. However, when you move to Oracle EPM cloud, it is just not “your infrastructure” anymore. It has changed 100%. Since you’re not working directly on the Oracle servers but using APIs, it will impact your existing integrations. You need to either build new integrations or take help of connectors that may impact your business process significantly.
- Keeping pace with Oracle EPM Cloud updates is a challenging task. Oracle offers monthly product updates to EPM cloud apps to add new features and also fixes bugs automatically. Oracle EPM updates have the potential to negatively impact your existing configurations and business processes. So, enterprises that are looking to migrate to Oracle EPM Cloud should prepare to regressively test their instances every month.
Risk-based Continuous Testing with Process Discovery – Your Pathway for Digital Transformation Success
- Autonomous process discovery – Although manual process discovery is still prevalent, however, it may not be considered as scientific since it is based on guesses and experience. AI-powered process discovery involves mining of data from various applications involved in executing a business process from beginning to end to deliver a current baseline. Enterprises can use the baseline model to re-engineer and optimize existing processes while ensuring minimum business disruption.
- Change Impact Assessment – Real-time change impact analysis helps enterprises how short sprint cycles or Oracle EPM cloud updates have impacted current business processes. Based on this, IT managers can take well-informed decision on the roll out of the release.
- Risk-based Coverage – In the short sprint cycles, testing everything is not a viable solution nor does it guarantee adequate coverage. Risk-based coverage helps you to test most impacted areas of your business due to release. Enterprises should use test automation framework that recommends test cases based on the impacted areas, cutting down test execution cycles significantly while ensuring adequate coverage.
- Self-Healing – Oracle EPM cloud features dynamic elements that don’t have fixed ids. Whenever changes occur to app, test scripts become flaky/brittle, leading to unstable test results. Enterprises should embrace test automation framework that autonomously detects the changes across elements and automatically fixes the scripts, minimizing test maintenance efforts.
- End-to-end integration testing – For end-to-end integration testing, enterprises should opt for test automation framework that supports multiple technologies including web, mobile, APIs, Desktop, Citrix, Mainframes and legacy applications. It helps them to test entire ecosystem based on the risks.