Maria Homann
Navigating the pool of Oracle automation tools can be a difficult task - there are many options, each with their own pros and cons. In this blog post, we help you with a checklist of the most important features for Oracle automation tools.
For most enterprises, Oracle is a part of a larger ecosystem of technologies and platforms that, together, make up the business’ core processes. This has implications for the automation tool; it must be robust and reliable, it must be capable of integrating multiple technologies, and it shouldn’t add additional complexity to an already complex web of systems.
This adds up to a number of features that your Oracle automation tool should have, whether it’s for test automation or for RPA (or both). These include:
- Cross-technology functionality, allowing businesses to test across all integrations.
- Intuitive and visual language rather than code, making automation design and maintenance easy.
- Robust GUI controls recognition and Oracle Forms automation capabilities, solving common maintenance burdens and technical challenges
In the following, we’ll have a closer look at each of these features, and shed some light on why these are important for your future Oracle automation platform.
1. Cross-technology functionality
The first feature, cross technology functionality, is critical because, although Oracle is central to your business, your business processes probably span across multiple applications, even within a single business transaction. If your tool doesn’t allow you to automate across technologies, you may have to use several partial automation solutions under one roof, which only adds additional complexity to your ecosystem.
What’s more, because Oracle in and of itself consists of multiple applications, spanning from legacy systems and desktop to newly developed applications and web, the chosen tool should be able to work across all these. This is the primary reason why Selenium, the popular open-source web automation tool, isn’t a good candidate for Oracle automation.
Related reading: Selenium automation? Everything you need to know to decide if Selenium is the tool for you
It goes without saying that if the goal is to create seamless and efficient end-to-end tests, that will let you validate not just single applications, but full processes, and give you full confidence in the quality of these, then cross-technology functionality is a must-have.
2. Intuitive and visual language rather than code
The second feature, no-code, is important for keeping testing fast and agile. Automation setup can be both time-consuming and challenging if it requires coding. Maintenance can be a major burden if it requires re-coding scripts for automation.
No-code solves this problem by making automation possible through a visual flowchart interface, giving you not only a shorter learning curve and faster setup, but also a clear overview of your testing suite once it is set up, that will let you make changes, due to Oracle software updates, for example, quickly and easily.
If you do choose to script your automation flows, there’s a risk that your testing will eventually become extremely time-consuming and challenging to maintain for non-coders as your testing suite grows, eating away at your available tester and developer resources.
Another advantage of choosing a no-code automation tool is that anyone in the organization, whether they are business experts or technology experts, can understand the automation flows that have been set up. This is a benefit in test automation, but particularly in RPA, as it lets anyone and everyone optimize their own workflows.
3. Robust GUI controls recognition and Oracle Forms automation
As mentioned above, maintenance is one of the biggest burdens in test automation, and particularly in Oracle systems due to their size and complexity, and so finding ways to lessen this burden can save teams from a lot of tedious work.
A robust GUI control recognition is a technical capability that ensures that the automation tool is able to find elements, even when they change slightly, which means less maintenance in the long run.
Another common challenge in Oracle automation is Oracle Forms. Oracle forms are developed on Java applet technology and sit as just one object inside the DOM, making it difficult to identify the form’s individual elements within that web object. For this, you need a tool that can go beyond the web element (which Selenium won’t allow you to), and read what’s inside the web object, allowing you to browse, interact and perform operations with Oracle Forms.
Another reason why Selenium isn’t optimal for Oracle automation is that Oracle web applications run on IE, and IE and Selenium aren’t compatible. Why? Because although Selenium supports IE, it relies on and uses drivers provided by browser vendors. The IE driver in Selenium isn’t built by Microsoft and won’t provide you with the stability and depth of testing that anyone using Oracle forms would need.
Read on in our whitepaper on automating Oracle to learn more about Oracle test automation and to see how three popular tools, Selenium, OATS, and Leapwork, compare on the above-mentioned critical features.
