February 08, 2021
With greater market competition and shorter release cycles, software development organizations are facing more challenges day-by-day. They compete to deliver the best and latest software or application as fast as possible. DevOps practices, tools, and processes have become a crucial part of the software development cycle. Among the several DevOps trends in the organizations’ DevOps adoption list, Continuous Testing is a must-have to win this continuous delivery race!
What is Continuous Testing?
Continuous Testing is a software testing procedure that helps in identifying and rectifying flaws at every phase of the development lifecycle of a software. Also, it can be said that it tests all potential code variations as early as possible. Continuous testing aims to reduce business risks as well as user impacts.
Continuous Testing Benefits
Continuous Testing surely comes with a lot of benefits. Here are some of most key benefits:
Continuous Testing assures faster delivery of web and mobile applications.
Continuous Testing encourages high-quality code.
Continuous Testing removes testing traffics in DevOps.
Continuous Testing provides useful and risk-related feedback. This feedback helps the testers or developers to find and fix critical defects during the code development process
Continuous Testing helps in smarter release decisions. To compete with others for continuous delivery and meet customer expectations, it is necessary to keep up with the release processes.
Continuous Testing is agile.
Continuous Testing builds a reliable and steady testing process.
Continuous Testing is more efficient testing. It helps the developers to conduct the right tests at the right time.
Continuous Testing provides a more stable user experience. It makes sure that the defective code does not reach the user and sabotages their experience.
Continuous Testing encourages integrated teams rather than isolated teams. It ensures that each team in the development pipeline works effectively and together.
Continuous Testing offers an omnipresent test environment access with service virtualization.
Continuous Testing highlights business goals to mitigate business risks.
Steps to Continuous Testing in DevOps
Initiation of Stable Automation – The first step of the continuous testing process is to set-up stable automation. Stable automation can be obtained when all the testing problems have been rectified. Also, when smart reporting recognizes between real issues and false negatives. A chief point of consideration for establishing stable automation is the team’s skillset. That will help to choose between various code-level scripting or a codeless solution.
Daily Cycle Run – The next phase of the process is to add a restricted amount of scripts in a reiterative pattern. Such that the process runs at least once a day automatically and without supervision on more than one platform. The point to be noted here is that the test scripts should run robustly and with minimum to nil false negatives. If the process is running with minimal false negatives, then the organization has a reliable automation process. This is a vital point in the way to continuous testing.
Increased Coverage – After achieving stable automation successfully, the next step is to increase the test coverage. The final aim is to gain valuable and useful functional and non-functional test automation coverage. In this stage, an up-to-date lab is required that can be of low-maintenance. The lab should allow a scaling process. Range of concurrent exaction and smart reportings are required to extract and remove noises from the true failures.
The Goal is 95% Test Coverage – The next stage is to reach 95% coverage that will require extra layers of environmental control and capabilities. They include network virtualization, service virtualization, and sensor mocking. Besides, high-value and high-trust testing are necessary to reach the continuous delivery goal. Dozens of concurrent exactions are run in this phase. Also, the reporting must scale to a huge amount of data.
Continuous ‘Continuous Testing’ Everyday – This is the ultimate stage where the process moves from automated testing “once a day” to “multiple times a day” (CI//CD). The advantage of this is even greater accuracy, faster feedback, and minimal risk. This phase is mandatory in the continuous testing process. This stage increases flexibility during the development cycle and reduces flaw fixing time by half.
Here is a list of the best continuous testing tools:
QuerySurge – QuerySurge is a smart data testing solution that delivers a full DevOps continuous data testing solution. The prime features of this tool include a robust API, comprehensive data intelligence and analytics, profuse data verification capability, and so on. Most importantly it helps for flawless integration into the DevOps pipeline for continuous testing.
Travis – This is a continuous testing tool hosted in Github. It presents hosted and on-premise alternatives. Travis offers a variety of different languages and fine documentation.
Jenkins – This is a Java-oriented continuous integration tool. Jenkins can be configured using GUI or console commands.
Selenium – This is an open-source software testing tool. Selenium supports every ruling browser such as Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc. Selenium web driver is used for web application testing automation.
In conclusion, continuous testing means testing early, testing regularly, testing everywhere, and automated testing. Before the release of the software in the market, testing continuously gives confidence to the software developers. As it leads to greater impact with bare minimum risk to their business’s bottom line.