Introduction Continuous Testing
As the technology is getting advanced day by day due to the advancement of digitization and artificial intelligence, the customer demands have increased significantly to reduce the duration of release cycle or sprint in case of Agile methodology without compromising the quality of the deliverables. Even a small code change requires a nominal period of six to eight weeks to complete the development, testing, and implementation. This duration is quite significant for the customer to get the delivery for the small business change and therefore, there is a need to build a successful Continuous testing environment where the release cycle duration could be further decreased without compromising the code quality in terms of performance, security, and scalability.
Continuous testing is nowadays a very important testing practice along with CI/CD Pipeline I.e. Continuous Integration and Continuous Development. Such testing is achievable through automation testing where the piece of code which is developed, integrated and testing immediately without going into traditional SDLC or phased approach of handling the software change. This process helps not only to speed up the release cycle but also ensures the code quality is mint and acceptable. Continuous testing helps to provide the earlier feedback and therefore helps to counter the business risk. Quality Analyst team is involved in the earlier requirement phase and they can start creating automation script in parallel to the code development and once both are completed at the same time, they can help to get the earliest testing feedback. Moreover, the existing automation scripts could be used for the Regression testing to ensure that the new addition of the code to the application haven’t broken down the existing functionality of the overall application. Continuous testing primarily focused on the usage of the application as well as the interaction of the application components with other applications.
How To Build A Successful Continuous Testing Environment?
An organization should make sure that they can counter the following hurdles in order to make sure that continuous testing practice has been achieved smoothly.
Break The Silo Team Culture And Become More Focused On The Team Collaborations
There should be an increased level of the team collaborations instead of working in a silo as a team. The developer is expected to take an additional step of unit testing and help in the development of automation tests in the collaboration of the testing team. The testing team can be more focused on the integration testing and quality performance. The QA team should be periodically providing feedback to the development team. Further, the operation team can help in the UAT testing to make sure that they are going to get the requirements fulfilled in the same manner as expected for the production environment.
The Inclusion Of Automated Testing
Automated testing saves time compared to the manual testing and therefore it is a basic requirement for Continuous testing. The automation testing should not be the user specific but it should be based on the continuous feedback from the collaboration of the end users. The automation testing framework should be very flexible to adapt quickly with the new changes and approach should be very generic.
Selection Of The Most Suitable Test Automation Tools
Test automation should be achieved with the help of the test automation tools (i.e. Appium, Test Complete, Unified Functional Tool by HP, etc.) or APIs such as Selenium, FitNesse, Cucumber, etc. The automation team should choose wisely the testing tool that suites the best for the automation requirement of the project. The decision should be made based on the Licence cost of the tool, team skills on the tool, capability of the tool to do automation by ease such as the use of drag and drop feature, etc. Automation saves our testing time and within automation, the choice of automation tool further saves our time to achieve test automation for the project.
Keeping The Test Bank Up To Date
Test bank is the collection of test cases, test suites, testing planning, and strategy documents. Test Automation is based on the test cases and test suites like manual testing. The project should be keeping these document updated from time to time along with the version control. A smart practice reveals that there should not be many test cases but only the required test cases which could help to unveil the defects very quickly. These smart test cases can be archived into the test bank for future references. A test-driven development (TDD) is one of the best approaches where the development of code is done based on the test cases in order to ensure that the test cases are going to be executed successfully as the code is based on that.
Consideration Of The Quality Concerns Due To Performance And Security Issues
We should not only be focused on the functional testing but also on the non functional testing such as load testing, stress testing, and security testing because these testing are essential for addressing the quality concerns of the deliverables and equally as important as the functional or behavioral testing aspects. There should be a benchmark set to evaluate the performance and security testing results.
Conclusion
Continuous testing is very important to work along with CI/CD Pipeline to ensure that the release cycle is expedited without compromising the code quality. Continuous integration fetches positive results when worked in the team with the collaboration and using the smart test cases along with the suitable test automation tools. Continuous testing helps in the early discovery of the defects as well as the release deliverable feedback which saves a lot of time for the release cycle as the early discovery of defects can be enabled with the early fix of those defects. Not only this, but continuous testing is also focused on the quality concerns and make sure that the deliverables are load and stress tested and they have successfully passed the benchmark set for the security testing.
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