Oracle E-Business Suite

Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) is one of Oracle Corp’s major product and it is an integrated set of business applications for automating customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain management (SCM) processes within organizations. It enables organizations to make better decisions, reduce costs, and increase performance.

Business Challenges

Oracle E-Business Suite applications impact core business processes. So performance is always an issue and some of key pain points are called out here.

  • How do your customizations impact other Forms Applications or E-Business Suite modules?
  • How do Oracle upgrades impact your customizations?
  • What is your approach to testing Oracle Applications pre-deployment?
  • How do you currently monitor Oracle Applications in production?

Oracle EBS Performance Testing

Oracle EBS Performance testing is to simulate the workload pattern on an Oracle EBS application to test its performance and scalability. Performance validation is done by using a load testing tool i.e. LoadRunner, Neoload, Jmeter and Oracle also provides the inbuilt load testing tool to generate a large number of virtual users that interact with the application. The load testing tool collects metrics on the application’s performance, such as response times, transaction throughput, latency and errors. This metrics can be used to identify potential performance bottlenecks and to ensure that the application can handle the expected workload.

Why is Oracle EBS Performance Testing Important?

Oracle EBS Performance testing is also important as other ERP packaged applications like SAP, Salesforce etc. for various reasons.

  • To ensure that the application can handle the expected workload i.e. concurrent users, transactions. It is important for applications that are used by a large number of user loads and high volume of transactional data or that are used for critical business processes.
  • To identify performance bottlenecks. This helps to improve the performance of the application and to reduce the risk of outages and poor end-user experience.
  • Performance testing can help improve the stability and scalability of the application to find out the break point in the system and evaluate the capacity of overall system.

Performance Testing Approach for Oracle Apps

Below is the high-level performance testing approach for Oracle Apps along with supporting tools

  • Identify the AUT’s critical business scenarios – The first step is to identify the application under test (AUT)’s critical business flows/scenarios. These business flows are used by most of the users for critical business processes such as order management, inventory management, financial transactions, or HR processes.
  • Determine the expected workload – The next step is to determine the expected workload on the application such as concurrent user loads, critical transactions throughput etc. It can be achieved by understanding the historical data from Product logs or by making estimates based on the user loads and the volume of data that is expected to be processed during load testing.
  • Selection of a right performance testing tool – There are a number of open-source and commercial performance testing tools available on the market i.e. Jmeter, LoadRunner, OneTest, Neoload. The selection of tool will depend on application complexity, tools capabilities and the specific needs of the project.
  • Develop a load test script – The next step is to develop the load test scripts. This is an automated test scripts that simulates the business flows by containing the required instructions & inputs for the load testing tool. The script will specify the number of concurrent virtual users, the type of performance test, and the duration of the test.
  • Run the load test – Once the load test script is develop, it will be executed by designing the Load, Stress, Endurance test scenarios. The tool will generate the specified number of virtual users and will interact with the application.
  • Analyze the results – The final step is to analyze the test results of the load, stress & endurance test. This will involve analyzing the performance metrics collected by the load testing tool, such as response times, throughput, and errors. This metrics can be used to identify performance issues, challenges and help to improve the performance of the application.

Oracle Load Testing Suite for Oracle Applications

Oracle itself have in-house tool for load testing i.e. Oracle Load Testing Suite designed specially for Oracle Applications and it is the fastest way to ensure the quality of Oracle packaged applications as well as any custom built Web applications. It is a powerful and easy-to-use performance/load testing tool that allows to automate key testing processes. OpenScript, an integrated scripting platform for load and functional testing that save test scripting time by approx. 50%. Oracle Load Testing Suite is a component of Oracle Application Testing Suite, the enterpiece of the Oracle Enterprise Manager solution for comprehensive testing of packaged, Web and service-oriented architecture based applications.

Oracle Load Testing Suite for Oracle Applications validates the performance and scalability of your Oracle packaged applications, web applications and APIs/services. It can simulate thousands of virtual concurrent users accessing the application simultaneously and measures the performance metrics by putting the load on applications without requiring a substantial hardware investment.

The testing accelerators for Oracle E-Business Suite and Siebel includes Test Starter Kits with pre-build scripts that can be used to speed up the testing process by either utilizing these pre-build scripts directly or by viewing them as templates while designing your own test scripts.

The realistic usage pattern scenarios that we can configure in Oracle Load Testing Suite can handle even the most complex applications. By enabling virtual users to simulate many different end user parameters (including configurable browser types, connection speeds, and think times), performance testers can stress their application just like real users will to understand exactly how the application will scale under peak load conditions.

Web-Based Interface
Oracle Load Testing Suite for Oracle Applications is deployed on the Oracle WebLogic Server and its intuitive Web-based interface allows us to configure your load test scenarios and provides graphs and reports that enable testers to analyze application performance during a load test. Testers can easily configure load tests from any Web browser, set up server monitors, run tests, and view real-time and post-run results.

Key Features of Oracle Load Test Suite

  • Automates testing of the most complex Oracle packaged and Web applications with robust test scripts
  • Integrated support for EBS, Siebel, Fusion applications, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, Peoplesoft and HyperionBrowser time simulation by allowing functional testing with load scripts
  • Simulates hundreds to tens of thousands of users while minimizing the test hardware required
  • True cloud based load testing support
  • Gathers critical application and infrastructure performance metrics to identify bottlenecks
  • Automatic hardware resources estimation for load test scenarios allows testers to estimate the required hardware
  • Scalable enterprise architecture built on WebLogic Server and Oracle Database
  • Integrates with Enterprise Manager to analyze middleware and database performance diagnostics under load
  • Provides integrations to ADDM and AWR reports from Oracle Load Testing console
  • Enables automatic generation of load test scripts from Real User Experience Insight
  • Supports Linux and Windows platforms