With the mobile application industry evolving at a lightning speed, enterprises are keen on adopting faster and advanced technologies to improve the quality of their applications. Application development keeps on advancing in terms of speed as well as quality, but software testing takes a back seat. As testing is the most crucial step in software development, the slow testing process becomes a bottleneck in faster delivery of applications. Hence enterprises have realized that QA teams need to move beyond agile and adopt mobile DevOps to accelerate the speed and enhance the quality of testing. As the name suggests, Continuous Testing is an automated testing solution that is implemented with an objective to provide quality related feedback continuously and at each and every step of the software development life cycle (SDLC). In this blog, we will understand continuous testing in more detail, explore its need in accelerating software releases and also analyze the type of continuous testing tools enterprises should leverage for developing high performing applications.
Continuous Testing Definition: Key Points
Continuous testing provides continuous feedback at every step of the software development life cycle. Continuous testing, after every change that is checked in by a developer – a set of automated tests are executed and feedback on the quality of the build is provided in terms of the test results.
As modern application development requires quick and quality releases, implementing continuous testing along with continuous integration ensures quality checks at every stage of development and avoids any unwanted effects during the later stages of development. This is how continuous testing basically benefits the software development process.
Additionally, continuous testing focuses on achieving continuous improvement in software quality as its main objective is to achieve continuous improvement in the software quality. Continuous Testing helps in assessing business risk coverage, clarifies the risk of the code and also checks if it should be forwarded through the delivery pipeline or not. Let’s list down some of key advantages of continuous testing :
- Continuous Testing can be easily integrated into the software testing pipeline
- Continuous Testing ensures that testing is carried at earliest stages of the development process rather than at the end
- Continuous Testing builds a safety net for an organization that secures the user experience
- Continuous Testing performs end-to-end testing to validate the end-user experience.
- Continuous Testing is a process which involves continuous optimization of a test suite to minimize business risk .
- Continuous Testing gives a faster and efficient way and accelerates software delivery cycle
- Continuous Testing clarifies the impact of change in a software application on its functionality.
- Continuous Testing resists delays and issues in the software release.
- Continuous Testing evaluates each and every layer of architecture at many stages of the software delivery process.
Importance Of Continuous Testing In DevOps
Continuous testing can easily be integrated into the software development pipeline and DevOps toolchain, there are some key points that should be taken care of. Here are some key considerations for using Continuous Testing in DevOps:
- A number of projects and their type including mobile, web, desktop-web, and responsive web.
- Skill set of the QA and development teams like testing skills, coding skills, and knowledge of development and programming languages.
- Team size for different departments in the DevOps pipeline like the development, testing, and operations.
- Tools and Technology to be used for test automation.
- Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) methods such as Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) and Behavior-Driven Development (BDD).
- Market analytics and trends for supporting new features.
- Clear metrics which can easily be understood without any issues.
Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, Continuous Testing & DevOps
Continuous Testing is a methodology which continuously aims to improve the quality of the software development life cycle to mitigate the business risks.
Continuous Integration (CI) is a practice which aims to simplify the process of a software release by allowing to commit small pieces of code regularly instead of vomiting the entire code at the end of the delivery cycle like traditional methods. It focuses on checking whether the main application is working properly after the new commits are integrated into the main application.
Continuous Delivery (CD) is considered as an extension to the Continuous Integration which focuses on making the new changes reach customers quickly. Continuous Delivery gives an option to automate the software release process and deploy the software at any frequency, be it hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or as per the business requirement. You can perform the entire process in just a few clicks.
How To Choose A Continuous Testing Tool-Key Features
Streamlined Test Creation
One of the most important elements of a continuous testing tool is its ability to provide a streamlined test automation process. Otherwise mobile application testing can become the bottleneck, and you will end up spending more time and money in fixing bugs and errors rather than utilizing it on innovation. Additionally you can find AI-powered continuous testing tools which provide codeless testing solutions that can help you create tests using simple natural language right from the design phase.
Scalable Test Execution
You can expect high scalability in continuous testing by fixing automation testing. Continuous testing demands a high degree of automation, and to achieve that, you would need to integrate robust testing suites across platforms. Choose a tool that helps you accelerate testing and enables elastic scaling, which are the two most crucial aspects of continuous testing as you grow. Having scalable test environments on the cloud can help you run your tests across thousands of Operating Systems, browsers, and other integrated test automation frameworks available on the cloud.
AI-Based Test Maintenance
The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) cannot only help you in identifying potential failures at the initial stage but also provide continuous feedback along the delivery pipeline, which can help you save execution time and cost. There are many cloud-based test automation tools which leverage AI to include relevant and affected test cases to run whenever there is a change in the code. Whenever there is a change, the code is tested and feedback is provided to the developer. Some of the top continuous testing tools use a dynamic locator strategy instead of using static locators to significantly reduce maintenance time and efforts.
Continuous Integration
Continuous Integration tools are crucial to run tests automatically. Look for a tool that can integrate all your test executions with your favorite Continuous Integration tools to automatically trigger test runs once the build is ready. It can also help you put test automation as part of your delivery pipeline automatically.
Conclusion:
Continuous testing is indeed the need of the hour and adopting the right test automation tools and integration will help go a long way in creating a continuous delivery pipeline that is effective and efficient. We hope the pointers mentioned in the blog will benefit you and help you in leveraging the right continuous testing tools in your organization.
