Patch Impact Analysis

Estimated Price: $9,000

It has happened to everybody. You get a patch from Oracle that you’re certain will solve a particular problem, and it does.

Unfortunately, the read-me file failed to mention all the other problems that would result and you didn’t test far enough beyond the specific functionality you wanted to fix.

It wasn’t the end of the world, but a lot of people were inconvenienced for a few days while you sorted out the problems and made the necessary corrections.

Every time this happens, and it’s astonishing how often it happens, you promise yourself that all future patches will be held until you have time to do them in a batch, followed by comprehensive end-to-end testing.

Quick patch solutions are just not worth the hassle and you’re tired of being abused for problems that aren’t your fault.

At SmartDog, we’ve seen this story played out so many times; we finally decided to do something about it. We’ve developed two automated assessment tools that can be used together or separately to identify exactly which parts of the system are affected by a particular patch or set of patches.

Data Impact
SmartDog will take a baseline of your setups prior to patching and compare them to the same information after the patching has been completed. This provides clear visibility into any changes the patch made to your setup and highlights new seed data introduced by Oracle as part of the patch that could affect your business process.

Component Impact
Once the patch(es) have been applied to a test instance, SmartDog will run an impact analysis to highlight all the components (forms, reports, etc.) that have been affected so you can focus your testing activities appropriately.

With these two assessment tools, you can be sure that every patch is thoroughly tested without waiting until there is time to test the entire system. Once again, SmartDog makes you more efficient.

Time to Implement: 5 days

Change Management: Low

Requires: Any Oracle Applications Installation

Assumptions: A test environment is available to do the analysis prior to patch application in PROD; This excludes involvement of a Functional Consultant to facilitate actions to be taken to address patch impact (e.g. testing).