Last week in our Selective Adoption series, we highlighted what we mean by “Define Your Strategy,” and what we are hearing about PeopleSoft Selective Adoption strategies from the community. As we continue down our Selective Adoption Series this week, I would like to talk about step 2 in our process: “Implement a Test Automation.” The purpose of implementing a test automation is to automate functional testing to run more tests with greater accuracy in less time.

Are you wondering why test automation is part of your Selective Adoption strategy? It’s okay if you are, I was too. Selective Adoption means no more upgrades, which also means data and data structures of the applications remain constant. It creates a different test cycle, and almost mandates some level of test automation. Because there are more frequent changes, requiring more testing, there is also more benefit to your organization from repeatable, automated testing. And there is substantially less need for test script maintenance, since the underlying application and data structures are not facing future upgrades.

The goal of setting up a testing system is to verify that modifications have not caused unintended effects and that the system still complies with its specified requirements.

Some of the key steps we have heard from customers who have established automated testing are:

1. Determine/identify the need
   • Does your organization need automated testing? (I think so)
   • How have your testing needs changed with Selective Adoption?
2. Determine/identify the scope
   • Define the test cases
   • Automate parts of the system most susceptible
   • Automate parts of the system that contain the most customizations
   • Start slow and grow over time
3. Define the approach
   • Define the tools to be used
   • Determine standards for documentation
   • Determine the data
   • Determine the validation
   • Determine how testing will happen
4. Set the criteria
   • Define when the system is ready for testing

This is just a summary of all that I have heard and seen from our community. To find out more and hear from other users about their experiences with PeopleSoft Testing, I would suggest attending one of the many Testing Panels we have scheduled on our Events page and watching some of the recordings from our Content Library.

Want more? Read the full article in the Oracle OpenWorld Edition of Q&A Magazine. If you can’t get enough top-quality PeopleSoft education, attend our Oracle COLLABORATE conference, COLLABORATE 18, April 22-26, 2018! You can also follow us on Twitter at our COLLABORATE 2018 hashtag, #C18LV!