2. Continuous Testing Best Practices
Working together and taking complete responsibility for the delivery and quality of the software is a necessity these days. This cultural shift can be attained by boosting collaboration while improving visibility to all stakeholders into a project’s objectives and status. Building a DevOps culture is entirely based on collaboration and conviction though it requires people to change their old mindset at times.
Continuous Testing Role in DevOps
Delivering large scale application suites can be extremely challenging. The extreme pressure of testing complex systems and meeting the demands of time-to-market make it increasingly difficult to deliver reliable systems in time.
The only potential way to meet these challenging demands of today’s business environment is to start testing from the beginning of software development lifecycle. This continuous test automation approach to testing includes requirements and system designs to be testable through automated techniques. Continuous testing also plays a major role in continuous delivery. It involves the usage of concepts and methods of Agile development for the QA and testing process, proposing more efficient testing process. Executing automated end-to-end testing as part of the software development continuously throughout the SDLC is termed as continuous testing.
Given below are a set of best practices that can help in implementing and improving testing throughout the software development lifecycle.
Continuous Testing Best Practices
1. Collaborate With Business
Continuous Testing means testing early and frequently. We must ensure to acquire requirements from business to start development.• Building a close relationship with the business analysts is important for QA
• Eliminating vagueness from user stories is important- one must ensure user story includes a clear set of acceptance criteria and is testable
• Ignoring non-functional testing can be risky as it can hamper security and performance
• Building meaningful and important end-to-end test scenarios by utilizing data/analytics and trends from the production website to collect information about user journeys and activities through the application should be significant
2. Lean Testing
Continuous testing requires completely focusing on providing value for business. Instead of spending effort and time on producing artifacts that do not provide value, the focus should be on organizing testing in a lean manner.
• Pairing testers with developers is important to ensure effective unit testing is executed
• Reducing unnecessary testing artifacts like carrying out extensive test cases and test plans, reducing wait times for testing should be kept in mind
• Adapting a more investigative attitude towards testing while testing manually can be helpful
3. Implement a QA Practice
• Building a strong QA and testing practice that drives development and defining an agile QA testing strategy can prove to be useful
• Running regular QA workshops where the testers can improve their soft skills as well as technical skills is significant
• Leveraging technical architecture diagrams, models of the applications, and implementing accurate test techniques are beneficial
4. Automated Testing
Continuous testing follows the test early and test often approach. Automated testing is useful in order to get quick feedback on the application quality.
• Making test automation a responsibility of both developers and testers is imperative
• Knowing when to automate tests and when to leave them as manual is critical for an effective and speedy delivery
• Running automated tests from a CI server is significant
• Automating new functionality and stories along development instead of leaving them for later should be the ultimate goal.
Conclusion
Continuous testing has proved to be a major asset to organizations who are looking to accelerate their software development and release schedules. TestingXperts, as an early adopter of DevOps and agile practices, helps fulfill delivery schedules in time and boost software development process. Know more about our Agile and DevOps methodologies and allow us to help you deliver your software applications faster and better.
Read more blogs on Continuous Testing:
1. Continuous Testing: Missing Link for Continuous Delivery
2. Enable Continuous Testing with Shift Left and Shift Right Approach
