Organizations are constantly investing in their digital transformation journey to enhance their business operations in today’s fast-paced competitive market. But, if done incorrectly, the advanced digital initiatives can hamper their projected growth, leading to a considerable waste of resources and leaving them in worse condition than before. Hence, organizations have come to terms that they should test their technology platforms. Additionally, they have learned to improve the management of their connections with their employees, customers, systems, and the data for the success of the digital transformation initiatives. Continuous testing can help organizations through the transition phase and minimize the risks associated with the software assets.
First introduced to decrease the time to receive developers’ feedback, continuous testing aims to test more often, especially at the early stage of development, and then test the entire unified codebase.
Continuous testing allows organizations to seamlessly integrate their software with legacy systems and boost their business efficiencies. For the DevOps team, continuous testing plays a massive role in skyrocketing their growth.
What is Continuous Testing?
Continuous testing involves testing early in the development lifecycle. It carefully evaluates software quality as part of the ongoing delivery process due to testing regularly.
In a traditional framework of testing, software is transferred by one team to another with a project that has clearly defined development and quality assurance (Q&A) phases. This process would demand a significant amount of time from the QA team to ensure quality, since it was prioritized over the project schedule. However, as today’s organizations have no choice but to deliver software to their customers rapidly, the traditional framework isn’t a feasible option.
With a continuous DevOps process, organizations can release software changes faster while moving from development to testing to deployment. Moreover, continuous testing helps DevOps teams to explore critical issues in the initial stages of development itself. As a result, it helps mitigate the risk of bugs beforehand and saves companies the cost of fixing errors further down the line. Continuous testing in DevOps also involves various stakeholders such as the development team, DevOps team, Quality assurance (QA) team, and operational staff.
Continuous Testing in DevOps
DevOps has its architecture, system, resource, and the process that operate. On its process side, there’s a strong culture of cross-discipline collaboration. Most of the time, developers collaborate when they produce code and pair-programming. Their work is frequently measured in days or hours of work. After the development is done, the code is ready for production, not for intervention.
On its technology part, DevOps understands and automates handover code between previously siloed departments. Continuous testing in DevOps concentrates on breaking down the silos of testing and QA to spread out to participate in the entire software development lifecycle.
In the DevOps environment, continuous testing can thrive if the organization is committed to transforming itself positively. But, for its successful execution, organizations shouldn’t be hung up on the most popular tools for the continuous delivery environment but instead spend their time deciding how these tools are tied together. Their ability to ensure seamless information exchange between tools can achieve the continuous aspect of their automation process. And in the process, it can remove the need for manual intervention.
Steps for Continuous Testing in DevOps
Establishing stable automation
Stable automation is the first step in DevOps Continuous Testing. Developers can have stable automation once the testing issues across the DevOps are remediated and smart reporting for clearly discerning between real problems and false negatives.
Running a daily cycle
In the next phase, the DevOps team should add a limited number of scripts into a repetitive pattern that runs at least once a day, automatically, successfully, and unattended on different platforms.
Increasing Coverage
After the stable connection runs at a reliable pace, the next phase is to increase the test coverage. Since the numbers can vary, the DevOps team should reach valuable and meaningful functional and non-functional test automation coverage. The original range may be from 90 – 95% The parts that are not automated will only occur at the end of the cycle.
Doing Continuous testing throughout the day
The final stage is continuous testing. In this stage, the process moves from automated testing every night to multiple times a day. The benefits of it are faster feedback, better accuracy as well as minimized risk. It also provides developers with better flexibility during the entire development cycle and usually reduces their defects by 50%.
Best practices for DevOps continuous testing
Successful integration of continuous testing in DevOps needs a high level of collaboration, where everyone maintains quality and cooperation. The team should decide on test cases before commencing coding. A few practices of continuous testing for DevOps include:
- Decreasing test waiting times with testing carried across all the stages of the delivery pipeline by reducing complexity.
- The testing should cover all aspects of a DevOps lifecycle. It will provide developers the feedback they need across all stages to ensure the quality of the software is under control.
- Organizations should access the requisite DevOps tools, dependencies, and resources to be successful with continuous testing.
Continuous testing is integral to DevOps’ continuous integration and deployment process pipeline. With continuous testing, the continuous integration/ continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline continually moves from the development to testing to deployment process.
Benefits of Continuous Testing DevOps
Continuous testing comes with many benefits for DevOps. Here is an overview of a few of them:
- Discovers critical bugs early
- Provides a smooth collaboration among developers, QA, and Operations team
- Enable developers to assess the quality of software at an early stage
- Removes the testing bottleneck from the DevOps procedure
- Delivers a stable user experience
- Assist in providing test results at a faster pace that results in improving the overall code quality
- Allows for a quicker time to market with a viable product as well as a continuous feedback mechanism
Conclusion
By understanding DevOps Continuous Testing’s architecture, steps and incorporating best practices, organizations can hope to deliver high-quality software while engaging in a continuous testing mindset to differentiate themselves from their competitors.
Why choose Yethi?
Yethi is a leading QA service provider to global banks and financial institutions, which is committed to address and resolve the quality challenges faced by organizations. Its test automation platform, Tenjin, is a 6th generation robotic platform that has a simplistic plug and play design. With its high-test coverage, it can effortlessly remove any redundancies and makes sure the system performs at its best. It offers great performance, flexibility, precision, and consistency for a seamless user experience.