Traditionally in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), a patch is a fix, a quick repair job, or a piece of programming designed to resolve functionality issues, improve security, and add new features. Throughout its lifetime, the software gets frequent errors called bugs which produce unexpected results, and a patch is an immediate fix to those problems. Applying modifications to the Oracle Fusion Applications environment is called Oracle Patching.

Functional testing is one of the final steps before a software application goes live, and it’s designed to ensure critical user paths are operating correctly. It’s a kind of black box testing that doesn’t evaluate the underlying code of the application, but instead tests whether a specific input leads to an expected output in the user interface (UI).