The Challenge:

Patches are an inevitablity when managing both E-Business Suite and Cloud Application environments; ranging from small one-off fixes for a particular issue to large consolidated and legislative patches for the E-Business Suite and regular patches for Cloud Applications. In all cases organisations should have a controlled approach for managing their effects, whether they apply them themselves in the E-Business Suite or Oracle applies them in Cloud Applications. One of the biggest challenges is to understand the impact of patches to carry out any mitigations and target testing activites.

While any patch may include hundreds or even thousands of modified components which of those that get applied on an environment varies markedly based on the existing state of the environment. It is key when assessing the impact of patches to isolate which specific components were actually applied during the patching rather than what components were included with the patch.

Certain patch components are difficult to review to determine their effects. For example, files that affect database objects and seeded application data are not only in formats that are difficult to assess they give no indication about the specific change that has occurred only the final state of those objects.

It is difficult to determine whether a patch has unexpectedly modified any implementation setups. Only by thorough testing might these effects be identified – however, teams cannot be sure that they have not missed such an effect without checking all setups.

For larger patches that affect database objects consideration must be given to whether a full customisation impact analysis should be carried out. In addition, some customisations may be based on a standard component; if that standard component is modified by a patch the development team should assess the impact on the custom version of the component.