Oracle Cloud runs on the principle of continuous innovation and rolls out quarterly updates. These provide improved features, functionality, and security. The newest is the Oracle 23C release, which includes new enhancements for the Financials, Supply Chain Management, and Human Capital Management modules.

To ensure that business operations are not disrupted, a robust testing plan needs to be implemented for each Oracle quarterly update. In this blog, we’ll highlight key changes that come along with 23C. We’ll also provide you with high-level test guidance to quickly certify your Oracle 23C release.

What is the Oracle 23C release date?

Oracle rolls out its quarterly updates in the following ways:

January/April/July/October
February/May/August/November
March/June/September/December

You can choose from the three mentioned cycles of quarterly updates. Since Oracle’s 23C is a long term release, the database has already been released for developers on April 6th, 2023.

Oracle Cloud's non-production environments are updated on the first Friday of your quarterly update month. Production environments are updated on the third Friday of your quarterly update month. Thus, you get a two week testing window to ensure that your business processes are working as expected.

Why Oracle’s 23C release termed as a long term release

The 23C release is termed as a long term release as it allows developers and data engineers to access formats for each use case without worrying about data structure, data mapping, data consistency, or performance tuning. They can now also run graph analytics on top of both relational and JSON data.

Oracle 23C's new features in Financial Module

While reviewing new features, it is essential to understand their impact on existing business processes. You can refer to the Oracle 23C release note. Based on the Oracle 23C documentation, we’ve summarized the new features, which are listed below.

1. Common Financials

With the 23C update, you can monitor workflow tasks and resolve exceptions for Account Coding workflow.
You can create and manage workflow rules using spreadsheets using Simplified Workflow Rules Configuration. You can add multiple approval actions to the same rule condition.

1. Intercompany

You can now correct Intercompany Transactions. Before this update the import process has to be reperformed, after fixing the error, if the incorrect data was uploaded.

Oracle 23C new features in Human Capital Management (HCM) Module

1. Global HR

Autocomplete Rules added in Person Business object for Hirji Date of Birth for a person in Saudi Legal Employer.

New Attribute “Tags” has been added in Document Type to group and classify document types at the time of creation or edit of document types.

1. Talent Management

Default order of the goals can now be specified in goal plans by administrators.

Oracle Grow, a part of the Oracle ME employee experience platform, has been introduced. It brings together all the elements that your employees need to excel in their current roles and for career growth, including learning, skill development, and gigs to develop competence and expertise.

Oracle 23C’s new features in Supply Chain Management (SCM) Module

1. Manufacturing

You can now remove a component from an in-house or outsourced subassembly that wasn't previously issued to the work order using an ad hoc negative material issue transaction. You can use the negative material return transaction to reverse or correct the negative material issue transaction.
You can use your existing login credentials for e-signature using an external authentication system instead of the Oracle WebLogic identity provider.

1. Procurement

In the Work List: Notifications and Approvals Work Area, a drop-down list has been added to filter tasks by when they were created. This additional filter applies only to the default My Tasks view.

Use the invoice currency of the supplier site when creating purchase orders from requisitions. You can now create requisitions where the price is negotiated in a foreign currency and release purchase orders to fulfill them in the local currency of the business unit.

Since it is beyond the scope of this blog to discuss all the functional and technical aspects of the Oracle Cloud 23C release, we have created a detailed advisory document to exhibit the same.

Oracle Cloud 23C Readiness

Oracle Cloud Readiness refers to an organization's level of preparation and ability to update their existing applications and data to Oracle Cloud's latest release. In this case, it is Oracle Cloud 23C. To upgrade to 23C, you must be on 19C or later.

How Opkey can help

Manual testing of Oracle Cloud quarterly updates within a short span of two weeks is a challenging task. Moreover, if you select regression tests based on guesses, you may end up doing over testing or under testing. Over testing consumes your time and under testing will expose your business to serious risks. You need a scientific way to select a regression test suite to keep business risks at bay.

You can address these challenges by incorporating test automation.

Opkey is a no code test automation tool that expedites your Oracle Cloud quarterly update certification. Before each update is applied to customers’ environments, Opkey runs a comprehensive series of automated tests to validate the features being released against your environment. Leveraging these tests, OpKey tells you clearly what is the change in your transactions, configurations, and custom screens. And immediately identifies the testing impacts due to those changes.

Opkey’s predictive impact analysis engine takes all the guesswork out of determining what needs to be tested before changes are deployed to your Oracle Cloud apps. Instead of testing all the test cases you only need to test those that are highly risky and their dependent components. Thus, eliminating hours of effort and struggle.

These tests validate:

• The health of the builds in a simulated existing customer environment

• Successful execution of tests in a simulated new customer environment

• End-to-end business process flows

• Primary use-case scenarios

• Alternate use-case scenarios

• Oracle Cloud’s security tests

• Reports and integration tests

• Additional scenarios derived from design specifications