Introduction
A global Consulting Firm selected Subject7 to accelerate implementations for clients deploying Oracle’s ERP Financial Cloud.
The company serves a growing base of Fortune 500 clients across all industries, including energy, retail, and healthcare. Their clients frequently seek to migrate from on-premise deployments of Oracle Financials to the Oracle ERP Cloud. The firm provides a highly customized implementation approach to each client and aims to improve key financial processes during the migration. Most importantly, the firm aims to ensure that no detrimental effects are experienced as a result of the migration. Since their clients are primarily publicly traded corporations, extensive testing must be undertaken to ensure an error-free migration.
Challenge
When the team of Oracle SMEs started providing software test automation via the firm’s Service Delivery Center, they originally settled on a test automation tool that required programming skills such as Python and Java in order to be used effectively. “We have six Oracle Cloud modules,” said one of their Oracle Solution SMEs. “We would have had to hire three or four highly experienced Python developers to write test automation scripts, which would have cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he added.
“We have functional teams that know the Oracle Cloud product, and we wanted to expand their skill set and empower the product SMEs so they could write their own test scripts,” he explained. “For them to learn Python in a short time frame was not feasible, so we had to explore options that would empower and enable non-technical team members.”
Solution
The firm explored using robotic process automation (RPA) technology, but quickly dismissed that approach. “RPA was insufficient because there was no test reporting capability or integration with other testing platforms such as Jenkins which we rely heavily upon” one of the Oracle SMEs recalled.
The initial attraction to Subject7 was that it didn’t require any programming skills to use effectively. Leveraging Subject7’s product strategy of incorporating the best of open source and improving it, the team was able to make efficient use of the Subject7 front-end which abstracted and simplified the complexity of Selenium.
“Now we can simply take a test case and make it a test automation case using Subject7. It’s very easy to modify existing test cases on the fly. Based on the needs of our clients, we can pivot quickly, delivering a huge advantage for us.”
One challenge the SMEs pointed out is that there are industry-specific requirements that vary from one client to the next. Subject7 provided the agility and versatility to easily replicate and modify test scenarios for each client, without having to recreate each test script from scratch every time.
As Oracle continues to release new releases or updates quarterly, he uses Subject7 to streamline testing new Oracle versions and configurations.
Prior to Subject7, the SMEs used screenshots to document their test cases. Now this team uses Subject7 to capture video of the test cases, publish in a shared portal and channel to Jira where an auditor can retrieve the video for review. “It’s an auditor’s dream to have the video for an IT audit.”
Results
Analysis indicated that it would take a Python developer two or three days to automate a manual test script. With Subject7, a tester with no Python skills could convert a manual test case to a Subject7 automated test case in two to three hours.
Another comparison made was that a 2,000-man-hour automation flow created manually could be done in just 10% of the time using Subject7.
Faster-Cheaper-Easier
Subject7 also supported the ability to use client-facing staff to create and run their own test scenarios, without any need for programming knowledge. Using basic principles of XPath and how web pages work, they could execute test cases whenever they needed.
Quality Testing in the Cloud
There’s a big benefit to using Subject7,” he pointed out. “Because we need to create highly-varied test scenarios, we found that we could create parameterized test cases and execute them quickly in Subject7’s cloud, allowing us to obtain almost-instant results from our test cases”
Adoption in new Practices
The firm’s experience with Subject7 has been positive and continues to grow and evolve. With a foundation of customer focused support and first-class service, the work that started with Oracle has now grown to include the firm’s Workday and SAP client delivery teams.
