Continuous Testing in an Agile and DevOps World
Today’s businesses embrace Agile and DevOps services to deliver quality software applications with speed and agility. Continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), and continuous testing (CT) are the chief factors to facilitate this quality digital transformation by leveraging the necessary DevOps metrics.
Changing market dynamics and increasing competition require code changes integration and compel businesses to evolve and innovate continually. Continuous testing in Agile and DevOps provides the framework to deliver software safely, quickly, and reliably.
What is Continuous Testing?
Continuous testing (CT) consists of early, comprehensive, and frequent testing using automation. In a typical CT scenario, the release candidate moves from development, testing, and deployment in tandem.
Once a developer checks in the source code, a set of unit tests are triggered. If the tests pass, the code is deployed on QA and performance servers for subsequent load and functional tests; else, the build is rejected, notifying the dev team with the feedback. The tests are run in parallel, and on the successful completion of these tests, the software moves to production.
Why is Continuous Testing Important?
Continuous testing services facilitate a quick and risk-free feedback loop for the QA specialists in the Agile and DevOps testing pipeline. With an ongoing testing strategy, businesses can ensure systems, processes, and automation to install enhanced feedback loops, accelerate time-to-market, and deliver desirable organizational outcomes such as responsiveness, operational efficiency, competitive differentiation, and high-quality services products, and improved customer experience. It optimizes the value of releases by helping dev teams meet organizational goals and managers make informed decisions.
Agile and DevOps Services Models
Continuous test automation and collaboration are imperative to deliver the best quality products and services in an ever-evolving competitive environment. DevOps services enable organizations to manage and implement rapid development changes besides addressing their acceleration and integration needs. With a built-in mechanism, DevOps services help organizations receive continuous feedback to deliver better quality outcomes.
Benefits of Continuous Testing
The powerful combination of continuous integration, continuous delivery, and constant testing enables businesses to deliver frequent and rapid quality software deployment to end-users. The range of benefits include-
- Enhanced time-to-market
- Enhanced productivity and efficiency by minimizing barriers between development, testing, and operations
- Ability to deliver frequent releases of stable and reliable builds
- Capability to make informed decisions with immediate feedback
- Ability to deliver products aligned to the market and reduced risk of completely automated Continuous Delivery
- Superior customer experiences
- The reduced overall cost of a defect with early and quick removal of defects
- Ability to objectively assess specific organizational goals for making critical go/no go decisions
- Offers universal test environment access with Service Virtualization
How can You Achieve Continuous Testing?
By implementing continuous testing in the earliest phases of the SDLC, you can uncover many process defects. As the worst defects are introduced primarily during the early stages of application development, continuous testing provides you with insights to fix them before they are part of your integrated systems.
Your team can use DevOps automation tools of their preference. At the same time, the business decides on the policy gates to ensure that the teams operate within the stakeholders’ set risk boundaries. In continuous testing, immediately after the developer checks in the code, the automated testing commences with unit testing and static analysis. Businesses can pass or reject the build based on the set threshold and the testing scan results.
Test automation significantly benefits static code analysis, scope assessment, scope prioritization, and change impact analysis and helps prevent defects besides accomplishing more within each iteration.
While implementing a continuous testing environment, you can ask the following questions –
- Is it possible for the software to be deployed during its lifecycle?
- Is the software deployable while the team is working on its upcoming features?
- Can the process receive automated and quick feedback after implementing every change?
- Can software versions be deployed in any environment with a push-button deployment?
Conclusion
Businesses have a competitive advantage with accelerated deliveries of top-quality software services and products. The complementary relationship between Agile, DevOps, and continuous testing enables today’s organizations to achieve this by making quality deployment a constant process.
Cuelogic focuses on world-class software engineering by building Cloud Native & Data-Driven applications for SMEs to Large Enterprises. We are a technology-driven agile organization focusing on building and managing software products using cutting technology to leverage scalability and cost advantages.
Cuelogic specializes in Outsource software development services, Devops Services, Cloud Services, IoT App development services, Data & Machine learning services