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Almac Group

Almac automates end-to-end testing for critical Oracle business processes

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reduction in test duration for recent large release

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tests automated in Tosca

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custom Oracle extensions under test within end-to-end test suite

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Company overview

Almac Group is a global leader in the pharmaceutical industry, providing a range of expert services and support across the drug development lifecycle. As experts in fields ranging from research and development, formulation development, and clinical trial supply services to commercial-scale manufacture and distribution, Almac is recognized as a leader in medical services, providing understanding, experience and knowledge to their clients to advance human health. In the last 5 years alone, Almac has contributed to over 50% of all FDA-approved New Molecular Entities (NMEs) and are currently supporting 30% of EU-approved /pre-registered gene therapy products.

To support these endeavors, Almac, like many health and life sciences organizations, has invested in software technologies to scale their most vital and complex supply chain processes, thereby honing their output of lifesaving pharmaceutical products with increasing precision. To keep pace with increasing digital adoption on the production side, Almac’s IT team knew a similar increase in testing speed and scale was necessary. Many of these supply chain processes depend on Oracle as the command center for those complex and crucial processes, and although those processes extend outside Oracle, they all pass through Oracle as the main hub.

Challenges

  • Lacked full end-to-end test automation for critical supply chain processes
  • Heavily customized Oracle EBS instance required complex test tooling
  • Heavy manual testing workload for QA group to adequately test Oracle updates
  • Communication loop between developers and QA group not as tight as desired

The foundation for test automation

In 2015, Shauna Quinn, Associate Director – Software Quality Assurance at Almac, began investigating different software test automation tools as part of a team-wide goal to incorporate automation across Almac’s end-to-end business processes testing strategy. After choosing their now-previous test automation tool, Quinn found early success in automating a number of Oracle-specific business processes such as shipping and fulfillment, but the tool was limited when it came to testing end-to-end processes that extended beyond Oracle. This lack of coverage made it difficult to validate the entire order to distribution process, limiting go-live confidence after an update to Oracle or integrated systems.

Almac’s Oracle EBS instance is highly customized to meet the company’s unique business needs and process definitions, such as the specifics of their manufacturing phase. Producing a single drug, for instance, contains multiple different manufacturing jobs and dozens of forms.

With a goal of improving release speed and confidence by fully automating testing for these critical end-to-end Oracle processes, she evaluated and ultimately chose Tricentis Tosca. It was the only tool demonstrably equipped to automate testing for end-to-end processes occurring within and beyond Almac’s Oracle EBS instance – ensuring complete coverage for their most high-value business processes.

Complex business processes require sturdy test automation

Quinn’s criteria for Almac’s ideal Oracle testing tool included the ability to automate three highly complex end-to-end tests for the order to fulfillment process, which would help ensure a seamless customer experience. These tests involve validating hundreds of steps across multiple phases, such as customer project creation, protocol delineation, quote generation, and purchase order submission. Only when each step is executed correctly does the customer’s purchase order enter the manufacturing stage.

Adding to the complexity is the fact that Almac purchase orders can contain both serialized and non-serialized items, each of which follows different processes. Some orders require the purchase of components from a third-party supplier, which follows yet another process, with additional steps that must occur before the order is fulfilled. Testing must verify that all of these various order types are transmitted correctly, and that all details remain intact as they travel through the warehouse, shipping, and finance stages.

All this to illustrate that testing these vital, end-to-end business processes is both enormously complex and critical to the business. With Tosca’s codeless, model-based approach test automation, the team has successfully automated end-to-end tests for each of these scenarios and can easily keep them up to date. Ease of maintenance is critical to the team’s success, as any change to Oracle EBS or a connected system – which occurs frequently at Almac – requires updates to the test cases. Tosca helps “immensely” with reusability, Quinn says, by making regression test packages easier to assemble – it’s easy to pull modify existing tests around distribution orders when they need to test a new distribution order step, for example.

There are many applications and areas in Almac that require frequent QA support, so the ability to build stable regression testing packs that can be used across multiple applications and scenarios has been key to their success, particularly with hundreds of Oracle customizations within their most high-priority tests.

Tosca has proven well-equipped to handle business processes of this scale and complexity, and Quinn’s team reports that during a recent large release, containing hundreds of changes to the fulfillment order process, her team was able to bring testing time from 1 day of manual testing to about 90 minutes with Tosca.

“Testing is definitely running quicker on Oracle EBS due to Tosca automation.” – Shauna Quinn, Group Head of Software Quality Assurance at Almac

Shifting left as far as possible

Exploratory testing is also an important part of Quinn and team’s test strategy.

The team conducts exploratory tests in their dev environment on a near-daily basis as code is completed, which helps guide the developers to potential defects earlier, when they are easier to address. Quinn introduced this extreme shift-left exploratory testing in the development environment a few years ago, and finds it’s helped increase collaboration between developers and QA.

“We’re as far left as we can be without writing the code ourselves,” reports Quinn.

With Tosca, the team can perform simple exploratory testing on new features in the dev environment and then quickly automate them for future regression testing (to verify that an updated login process works correctly, for example). Now, any time a developer submits a code build into GitLab, a Tosca test is triggered, and developers can quickly see the pass/fail status.

The team utilizes Tosca Distributed Execution Agents (DEX) automation to run in multiple environments including outside Oracle depending on the needs and timing of project in each environment. Some cases have full CI/CD tests embedded, but some entail automated testers coming in and supporting manual testing efforts. This flexibility allows Quinn’s team to apply focus according to priority on a case-by-case basis.

With this combined approach of exploratory testing and automation, the Almac QA group is well-positioned to deliver updates faster and with higher quality as their business demands grow.

The Tricentis implementation experience

During the Tosca implementation process, the team identified roughly 600 useful automated tests from old sources. Their previous tool’s test cases were too complex to migrate, so Tricentis experts from the professional services team collaborated with them to recreate all those tests in Tosca to ensure the team could hit the ground running. Quinn reports that the Tricentis support team’s responsiveness and fast ticket resolutions have helped keep their progress on track

Increased Oracle test coverage at quality

Overall, Quinn and her team have found incredible success in achieving faster, more comprehensive testing of their complex Oracle instance and built automation that covers Almac’s most critical business processes, ensuring business continuity any time updates are made. They also recently implemented Tricentis qTest, which integrates with Tosca. Next, the team plans to schedule, kick off, and report on Tosca test runs within qTest. Those results will then be displayed immediately for developers working in Jira, which will further streamline feedback loops and improve visibility into requirements coverage and release readiness.

“We expect to see increased collaboration and communication between developers and testers. The dev team can open a defect the testers send over in Jira, change it, send it back to the testing team, and then see that the test has passed, all in a single day.” – Shauna Quinn

Results

  • 93% reduction in test cycle time for recent major release
  • Full end-to-end testing achieved for most critical supply chain processes
  • Heavily customized Oracle EBS instance now smoothly tested and maintained during updates and further customization
  • Near-hourly communication between developers and QA group
  • QA team able to spend more time in strategy rather than manual testing fire drills

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