PcloudyHave you ever come across continuous testing and its key components? If not, Here is an article that highlights the use and applications of implementing a Continuous Testing Solution.
Continuous testing offers end-to-end solutions that work with a current development procedure. It can eradicate bugs and make continuity easier throughout the SDLC process. Moreover, it is the best way to boost, improve, and support the CI/CD pipelines.
The primary concept of continuous testing is to test at an early stage, testing at all stages of the life cycle, and testing often. Here, we’ll intensely discuss the continuous test concept, its fundamental concept, and the benefits if you start implementing it.
What is Continuous Testing?
Continuous testing is software testing methodology in which the product is classified often before, and throughout the continuous delivery process. Continuous testing leverages automated tests to ensure teams receive instant feedback to mitigate more risks as feasible throughout the development process rapidly.
Moreover, team members are continuously able to learn about their products and additionally learn about ways to maximize reliability and quality. Implementing continuous testing in your organization can be complicated, but you must design a test plan to establish a smooth transition. Different methodologies that have been embraced and accepted, such as DevOps and Agile are at the core of Continuous Testing. Development cycles have slowly been diminished from months and weeks to days and hours. And manual testing processes are rapidly exchanged by automated testing.
There isn’t a doubt that the development concept has changed for the betterment. On the contrary, testing techniques were battling to keep up. We could not test quick-release cycles properly, leading to slow software development processes or insufficient quality assurance. Continuous testing allows us to keep pace with constant development updates. It provides a constant feedback loop to plan, develop, test and deploy updates faster from start to finish. One primary aim of continuous testing is to assess business risk coverage right from the start. It instantly provides insight into whether a software launch is good to go or risky.
Key Features to Successful Continuous Testing
Continuous testing needs high-level collaboration, where everyone maintains cooperation and quality. Test cases must be elaborated before any tests are written, or coding commences, and automation and developer architects must work together to ensure code optimization for test automation. The best steps of continuous testing are:
Testing should cover all aspects of a QA environment and asset production. It’ll enable feedback to be offered to developers at all phases and assure overall software quality under development.
Keeping things logical and straightforward to reduce the test waiting times with testing executed at all phases of a Continuous Delivery pipeline.
To acquire complete success with the help of continuous testing, organizations need to explore and implement test automation, adopt various DevOps tools, resources, and dependencies.
Continuous testing is an indispensable part of DevOps CI/CD pipeline and deployment process. CI/CD pipeline code is shifting from development to testing deployment continuously.
Let’s take a sneak peek into crucial features of continuous testing:
Automated Testing
As a part of continuous testing planning, businesses need to develop a strategy related to robust test automation. It must focus on all testing aspects, including UI and API integration testing. While choosing a particular testing area, testing teams must always be well-equipped with a strategy to accommodate all testing types as per the need.
Automation means executing a program with limited or no involvement of humans. Executing test cases by leveraging test automation tools or third-party tools is known as test automation or automation testing. Automating various testing tasks accelerate the overall App Development Life Cycle and help release updates quicker.
Continuous Integration (CI)
Continuous Integration allows us to integrate all the code changes from multiple contributors into a single central repository. What’s more is that the entire process is automated giving us the accuracy we need and reduced human error and involvement. Continuous integration is a well-known DevOps practice that is crucial for any business or company that wants to implement or adopt Continuous Testing as their go-to testing strategy.
Continuous Delivery (CD)
Continuous Delivery is a practice where code changes or modifications are automatically ready for a release. Continuous Delivery is an indispensable aspect of today’s application development life cycle. It is created upon Continuous Integration (CI) in deploying code transfer to test environments after the development phase. When incorporated rightly, developers will have deployment-ready antiquity passed through a regulated testing process. Continuous Delivery enables developers to automate their testing far from unit tests in a test-driven deployment. It allows them to certify application modifications across various dimensions before applications are made available to customers. Tests might involve:
Load testing
Regression testing
UI testing
API reliability testing
Integration testing
These testing types help developers to ensure that the validation of modifications is thorough and give them insights into the detection of any glitches or deviations.
Benefits of Leveraging Continuous Testing
Testing Everywhere: Testing throughout the development, deployment, and Delivery.
Faster Releases: speed up Delivery for production and faster release.
No Compromise on Quality: Accomplish continuous quality and improvement.
Find and Release Bug Fixes Faster: Testing early helps us detect bugs early on in the development phase to release the bug fixes faster.
Reliable Testing Tools: Availability of testing tools that encourages continuous testing to make the procedure more reliable, easier, and faster.
Increased Testing: Running parallel testing helps us accelerate the test execution speed and also increase the number of tests performed at any given time.
Better Collaboration between Teams: Continuous Testing helps us eradicate silos between the testing, operations, and development teams.
Reduced Business Risks: Continuous Testing highlights all the potential risks even before they grow into sizable issues.
DevOps: Smoothly implemented into your DevOps strategy.
Significant Challenges of Continuous Testing
Change in culture: Cultural change among your testing and development teams might occur if traditional procedures are maintained.
Code integration: Developers who need to integrate their code regularly and design defect bugs with non-compatible code and copied coding efforts.
Adjust to DevOps: Professionals must process the correct testing tools and training for continuous testing with DevOps and Agile frameworks.
Production environments: Ensure your production environments reflect the test and reverse the test environment to ensure proper testing of every area.
Update testing strategy: Maintaining only regular testing procedures and test data management that need to be precisely defined. It keeps continuous testing from reaching its full potential.
Test environments: Ensure that your test environments work within your code repository base for a smooth testing of the newly available code.
Final Thoughts
All stages of SDLC are very significant. To generate high-quality software, we should prepare a continuous testing mindset to accelerate quality releases in the market. Continuous testing goes beyond app test automation and leverages modern activities such as CI/CD to assure a quality product throughout the entire software delivery pipeline. Multiple testing types are available to incorporate continuous testing planning. As a result, production testing considering the appropriate tools provides remarkable benefits to companies and has become a crucial part of a robust continuous testing strategy.
