Oracle Application Testing Suite Reviews

We were using OATS as part of an Oracle-EBS Implementation project in Middle East for an Oil Field Service Company.

We also used OATS in Automation and Functional/Performance testing for HRMS, Financial, Projects, and SCM modules

The Product as a whole is an integrated package with excellent co-relation with all Oracle Applications and any web-based application. The Functional testing module called Open script is especially very useful in Automation Testing of any web-based application or Oracle Project.

OATS has played a major role in expediting the testing and Performance Analysis of Oracle-EBS application. It has played a tangible role in meeting the Project deadline and helped in the Go-live of various components of EBS.

The Performance testing tool called Oracle Load Test has been helpful in testing the Performance and scalability of the application.

There are certain bugs which were present but was cleared in subsequent releases of application, but still there is room for improvement in the Functionality testing tool when Automating form-based applications.

The application under test (Oracle EBS) was thoroughly tested using OATS and issues were rarely found.

Issues with scalability for the application under test was found using Oracle Load testing tool which is part of the OATS Package.  The applications then remained stable after Go-Live.

We didn’t find any scalability issues with the application as we had successfully implemented and worked with this application in an MNC.

We had raised a Service request regarding OLT (Oracle Load test) tool with Oracle and the customer service was prompt.

We had used HP QTP, QC for projects involving Oracle Applications and found the correlation very difficult, but OATS works like a charm…it’s stable and the coding we need to use is not very complex.

Initial setup of OATS is a straightforward process but care should be taken while installing in server.

The product was implemented by our in-house team.

ROI is very good considering the advantages of using this product like reducing implementation time and ensuring quality of the product/Software you are implementing.

The great thing about this product is it is free of cost , but if you need advanced support from Oracle then you can buy certain module of this project from Oracle.

The product is the go-to product for all Oracle Applications because of the compatibility and correlation with Oracle Applications.

We had used HP QTP for a project involving Oracle-EBS and found the correlation very difficult.

You can make the Testing and Automation more efficient using OATS and can ensure that whatever application you are implementing, whether it be an Oracle Application or any web based application is thoroughly tested and the quality is ensured.

Test Manager “TESTS”

1. I can organize test scripts pretty well.

2. The custom dashboard views are nice to look at.

3. Sorting tests is pretty easy.

1. The installation routine desperately needs improvement. It was very easy to mess up.

2. The “un-install” is basically not supported and resulted also in a messed up computer.

3. In the OATS Administrator tool, setting user assignments and roles to projects was tricky, scary and dangerous. Updating somebody’s account access sometimes had unexpected and bad results like getting “locked out” of the product.

Two years.

The test installation pretty much destroyed my computer’s laptop performance. It had to be “reimaged” to recover. It was eventually installed on a dedicated server.

Some user accounts had to be removed and new ones created because of corruption.

For example:

1. At some point my user account could not move or organize the position of folders and tests.
2. Another user would crash the entire product whenever she choose to open one specific project.

I am not aware of any issues.

Customer Service:

The training people were good.

Technical Support:

I have not had to deal with support.

We also use TFS. We are using OATS because my company purchased an Oracle ERP solution.

There did not appear to be a simple installation routine. The initial setup was complicated with many parts to consider including binaries and a local database.`

I believe a vendor did the original implementation.

Brace yourself for bumps in the road. Have patience. Find talented people to help.

• Recording and playback
• Load testing 

Our benchmark load tests for a major release involving various scenarios with a combination of different virtual users relied on the recording, playback and eventual load testing capabilities of OATS.

1. The tool runs out of memory when the recording flows are long and involve many screens despite increasing the memory settings for OpenScript 
2. We found the tool impossible to use for client side performance testing without filtering out JS, CSS, PNG etc as the method would error due to a Java method size limitation. 
3. Parameterization of variables using regular expressions was not a foolproof way of running tests as it would mostly work for a single user but fail during load testing. 
4. Parameterization involving SQL queries was not straightforward 
5. Except a YouTube video/PDF which covers some basics and is probably outdated now, there are no tutorials available for other functionalities that the recording tool provides.There is no in-depth tutorial of the load testing interface and troubleshooting steps. 
6. Collection of system metrics - although there are multiple parameters defined, it did provide a holistic picture of the state of the system.We had to implement our own way of obtaining this. 
7. Load testing web interface did not provide details about errors. The only way to correlate was to inspect server logs.

One year.

Yes, with 12.2.x

Yes, 12.2 was not stable. Upgrading to 12.4.x resolved a lot of previously known issues

No issues encountered.

This tool did a much better job recording the http requests during web load testing than other open source tools. Cookie management and other url parameters were handled efficiently and were easier to identify in the tree view.

It was straightforward for the most part except that at times the services wouldn't run and un-installation messed things up.

In-house.

I believe we made a wise choice despite some shortcomings and hiccups.

We evaluated other options.

Read the tutorial and try out a few scenarios before going full throttle.

Importing a RUEI log into OATS to convert it into a load test

For a few years, OATS was the only tool that allowed us to load test our Computer Telephone Integration (CTI) with Siebel.

Our team is a contractor for a Siebel call center solution for the US government. Using Seibel means we are mostly an Oracle shop, but most of our test tools are HP. The one exception to that is OATS, which was formerly owned by Empirix when it was called eTester and eLoad. OATS has some promising features that frankly we wish we could utilize, but so far we haven’t had much luck doing so. Previously we did use it as a way of load testing the Computer Telephone Integration (CTI) aspect of Siebel. Even this needed to have custom Java code to implement though, and now that LoadRunner 11.5x is released, it can support our CTI load testing efforts as well, so we’ve gone away from using OATS for this.

2 years off and on.

Nothing significant.

No

Not up to 300 vusers, though this is not a large amount.

We use Loadrunner for all other load testing, but used OATS and Open Script just for CTI load testing.

Straightforward for initial setup, but complex for what we wanted to do. OATS runs as a suite hosted on a web server, so users access the test management piece via a URL. Scripting is done via Oracle’s OpenScript, which is their scripting development environment with Java, so being able to program in Java is probably the most important skill to have for using the tool.

Directly from Oracle.

We researched if this could be done in Loadrunner first.

Be sure your team has the right amount of expertise in OpenScript (Java) before deciding to use this product.