Oracle Application Testing Suite Reviews

One feature that I find valuable and very useful is the ability to use a different version of the database for the repository other than the Oracle Lite DB that it comes with by default. This means you can make your database repository fully redundant and infinitely scalable.

OATS provides the functionality to institute a corporate-wide standardized method and approach for all types of application testing. This tool is perfect for organizations that do a lot of in-house development and/or regularly perform maintenance. I would say it is a mandatory tool to have and use if your organization is planning to perform a major upgrade or begin a large implementation.

There is one piece of functionality that is currently not offered and would be very good to have: Support for Digital Certificates authentication and Single Sign-On (SSO). This method of authentication, to the best of my knowledge, is still not supported by OATS and would be a great addition to the tool.

I used OATS for over five years. While working for Oracle Consulting, I've seen the tool used successfully at numerous clients.

It is easy to deploy.

It is very stable.

It is very scalable.

Within the Oracle ecosystem, OATS has a small but very capable and technically advanced support team. To the best of my knowledge, most of these folks came to Oracle as part of the acquisition process of OATS, meaning they were supporting and/or working in product development of OATS for a long time.

I used HP LoadRunner in the past and do not really have a preference for either OATS or LoadRunner.

The initial set-up/install/deployment is very straightforward and should not present any problems for any reasonably technical person.

While working with Oracle Consulting, I implemented OATS myself personally as a hired Oracle consultant as well as together with clients' in-house teams.

One advice I would give if you are planning to do a multi-node install on Linux/Unix is as follows: Unless your organization is very familiar with the product and complex architectures that require fault tolerance have someone from Oracle Consulting come in for a short engagement, set everything up, document everything and do a knowledge transfer. This way you will be ahead of the curve from the start. From personal experience, any kind of rework is always more costly than doing it right from the start.

It's a little complicated to calculate an ROI of a product that isn't replacing another product. I would say the best way to calculate an ROI is not to focus on OATS and its associated cost, but to calculate the amount rework needed to fix issues if OATS were not to be used.

There are basically only two products that cover the space of Performance/Scalability/Functional Testing on the market. OATS from Oracle and LoadRunner from HP.

One advice for anyone planning to implement OATS: Make sure there is an existing Java skill-set in your organization as OATS' recording language is Java.

Openscript and Oracle Load Testing (OLT) as I worked on performance testing with this tool.

It helped in running performance testing cycles and identifying the bottlenecks of the application, helping our clients to run their application successfully and smoothly.

Also, I used it for automating manual flows, which helped in saving time and effort in manual testing.

Improvements can be made in a number of protocol support areas, including enhanced Citrix support.

Also, the reporting utility for load testing could be improved.

I've used it for three years.

Garbage collection of our WebLogic server was not working properly when running large volumes of performance tests.

My experiences are good. There is a forum where you can post your issues and experts and others users will answer them.

Also, a service request which will be resolved quickly would be nice. There were a few patches given by the dev team to resolve issues.

Initial setup is straightforward. It will install Oracle Database, WebLogic Server, and other components by itself. At every step you will be prompted on your screen, but no other setups steps are required.

We implemented it in-house, but only a person who has good experience should be involved in the implementation, otherwise some issues might come later.

If you are using the Oracle bundled application then it is he best tool available in the market. But in some areas it lacks features and protocol support that its competitors, such as HP LoadRunner, have.

You should have a good and experienced person working with it, and also they should take people who have prior Java programming knowledge. The tool uses Eclipse IDE and Java script.

Robustness of Oracle Application Testing Suite to manage end-to-end testing of projects, especially in Oracle ERP implementation projects.

Oracle Application Testing Suite is very good for managing testing through Oracle Test Manager (OTM), automating test cases with Oracle Functional Test (OFT) and conducting performance testing in Oracle Load Test (OLT).

Implementation of Oracle Application Testing Suite package has increased the overall efficiency. Test cases and defects are now tracked well in Oracle Test Manager which help management to have better visibility and traceability. Increasing automation coverage has been reducing manual efforts in executing test cases and in a recent test cycle automated execution, it saved seven days of manual execution effort in a two-week test cycle.

OTM Test Report – We needed to develop custom reports as there is less flexibility.

OFT Support for Non Oracle ERP/CRM Product – As of now OFT supports only Oracle ERP/CRM Products. OFT has to support other vendor’s ERP/CRM packages to increase its base.

I've used it for over five years.

In Windows 7 and in Windows 2008 R2 server deployment is very straight forward. In Windows 2012 R2 server, deployment is a little bit tricky as .NET Framework 3.5 is not a part of OS distribution. One has to separately install it. You have to take care of this before going for installation in 2012 R2 Server. For Linux/Unix deployment you have to be well aware of Unix/Linux OS environment and you need database administration knowledge/support.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

Customer Service:

It's good, 7/10.

Technical Support:

It's good, 7/10.

We switched because of lower licensing costs and it has good support for Oracle ERP/CRM.

It wasn't complex.

We implemented it in-house. Though the initial set up is not very complex, implementation should be done by resources who have good experience in Oracle Application Testing Suite and have a testing background. Database administration knowledge or support is also required.

I don't have specifics, but the product is cheaper than similar products from HP UFT and Quality Center.

Oracle Application Testing Suite is best suited for managing testing activities in implementation and upgrade project for Oracle’s ERP/CRM products.

The best feature of this and Load Test is simplicity. They are probably not as functional as the corresponding HP products, but you can start using them immediately after installation. Script development platform is based on Eclipse IDE and was much better and stable than LoadRunner VUGen 11.5 and earlier versions.

Load Test has perfect monitoring features. It fully supports JMX (we were able to monitor WebLogic internals in a couple of clicks), modern SNMP versions, flexible custom metrics, etc. We didn’t have any problems with collecting data we wanted from Windows, Linux, Solaris machines, and that’s really great. I can’t compare it with HP SiteScope (don’t have much experience with it), but it definitely beats standalone HP LoadRunner facilities.

I also liked the web interface of the Load Test controller. It supports remote test execution and provides quite convenient API. You don’t have to use separate solution as Performance Center or LoadRunner Analysis to create test reports and provide remote access to your test artifacts.

The scripts are written in Java, so migration from C (used in our LoadRunner scripts) to Java significantly accelerated and simplified script development. We have also managed to monitor our infrastructure more precisely.

Load Test provides great facilities and templates to monitor other Oracle products and create simpler scripts to automate load test pipeline. You load the script into Load Test, run the test, and generate the report.

I’m not sure about the functional testing API, but the load testing one wasn’t rich. We had to extend it by adding lots of functions, but it can be easily done. Transaction handling was very simple and I’d say quite primitive. We were unable to pause, dynamically create them and change their state, such as transaction name and other properties.

API was convenient but too poor, but I know that Oracle has extended it. Reporting features were very simple as well, especially report templates.

We've used it for about a year. We’ve migrated our scripts and related test automation (e.g. report generation) successfully. It wasn’t perfect. We had to migrate our HP LoadRunner 11.5 scripts to Oracle Linux Test, and we had to do a lot of manual work to add features missing in it, such as writing custom functions in scripts, calculate target metrics with SQL on its database, etc. Though it was mostly stable and reliable, Test Management wasn’t. However, things may have changed in updated versions.

As far as I remember, we had lots of issues with Test Management stability, but the recent version are stable. We had several issues with Load Test monitoring, but were quickly fixed by Load Test developers.

It's excellent. We usually got help in a couple of days (hours in critical situations). The Load Test team frequently asked for feedback from our managers and included our suggestions into releases.

We tried a lot of solutions and used HP LoadRunner for six to seven years before switching. When Oracle Application Test Suite became ready for enterprise usage and met our needs, we started to use it, partially because it’s free for usage with other Oracle products.

It was really simple. The installation package can do everything for you (install WebLogic and Oracle XE) or you can customize the process. Anyway installation process is very transparent and flexible.

We did it ourselves with a little assistance from the development team. The documents are a good starting point so almost all of the questions can be addressed after reading the manual.

It was completely free for us, because we use it with other Oracle products.

It is a simple yet useful tool for performance testing. Compared with LoadRunner, it’s definitely less functional. I’d recommend you to try their free (development) version to understand what it does and does not.

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.