Unlike other IT systems, which tend to have very daily procedural or coded steps, business intelligence systems have an inherent complexity due to the query engines that form a large part of the system. OBIEE is no different, and with an upgrade like this, it is vital that we should test the system before releasing it live to our business users. In addition to the extra validation rules in the consistency check, there are changes to the query engine that can subtly alter queries that have been modeled identically in both 11g and 12c. Also, due to the upgrade and changed functionality in the Web Catalog, upgraded reports may show changed behavior. This can range from missing labels to reporting aggregates, producing results different from those previously expected.
The basic stages of a full regression test are described in the following sections.