Due date: 23:59 p.m Oct 25th, 2021
The State of Quality Report 2021
Wouldn’t it be great to know how peers and experts are staying ahead of their quality assurance game? That’s why we're creating The State of Quality Report 2021 to collect the best QA practices from you, professionals of all levels.
We are happy to offer the first 100 respondents a $30 Amazon gift card, along with the final report from the survey results. Raise your voice!
Overview
We are living in a competitive era where meeting customers' expectations and demands are the keys to winning over your competitor. As the need to release quality software products in the short amount of time continues to accelerate, incorporating continuous testing into your organization is a great way to ensure your product is released to the market at quality customer expect.
What is Continuous Testing?
Continuous Testing is a software testing type in which the product is evaluated early, often, and throughout the entire Continuous Delivery (CD) process. It enables constant feedback for developers to fix bugs before being released to production. Incorporating continuous testing into your organization’s testing strategy accelerates your time-to-market but improves the quality your customers expect. Read more detailed definition here
Benefits of Continuous Testing
Let's break down a few benefits of continuous testing!
- Increase release rate: Speed up delivery to production and release faster
- Communication transparency: Eliminate silos between the development, testing, and operation teams
- Accelerate testing: Run parallel performance tests to increase testing execution speed
- Find errors: Ensure as many errors are found before being released to production
- Reduce business risks: Assess potential problems before they become an actual problem
Key Components of Continuous Testing
Continuous Integration
Continuous integration (CI) helps ensure that software components work together. It gathers code from developers working on one project and placing it into a code repository. Integrating different developer’s code into one project can generate a lot of bugs. And this is where continuous testing comes into play.
Continuous Delivery
Continuous delivery is the process that helps deploy all code changes in a build to the testing or staging environment. It is an integral part of continuous testing as it makes it possible to release builds to the production environment when needed.
Want to learn more about CI/CD? Check out my previous article for The Complete Introduction to CI/CD
Test Automation
Continuous testing can’t be done without test automation. While manual testing is laborious and time-intensive, automation gives time back to your engineers to actually fix the bugs found during testing. Automating your test executions each time the code is integrated will allow you to find bugs as early as possible and fix them faster. Find bugs before they’re released to production and you can save yourself a lot of time, money and effort to fix at a later day.
How to Perform Continuous Testing
Continuous testing should be implemented at every stage of your CI/CD pipeline. It works best by using the most recent build in an isolated environment. You can also set up test suites at every point code changes, merge or releases. This will help reduce time and effort on testing but still reap quality rewards.
Below are some of the best practices to help you implement continuous testing to best serve your organization’s need.
- Adopt more test automation: automation increases the speed and errors coverage at which testing can function. Automating as much as you can in the development lifecycle will help you achieve faster releases.
- Tracking metrics: Use quantifiable metrics to keep track of your success or failure rate during testing
- Keep communication transparent: Keep your communication lines transparent to prevent the testing pipeline from becoming siloed. Active communication is the key to achieving the balance necessary to effectively carry out continuous testing.
- Integrate performance testing into delivery cycle: Performance testing is an integral part of continuous testing as it helps check the speed, responsiveness, and stability of your application.
Continuous Testing Tools
Tools are very useful to help make continuous testing even faster. Below are some of the best tools for your specific requirements.
Travis CI
Travis CI is a continuous testing tool hosted on GitHub offering hosted and on-premise variants.
Jenkins
Jenkins is a continuous integration tool using Java language and is configurable via both GUI interface and console commands
Katalon Studio
Developed by Katalon .Inc, Katalon Studio offers a comprehensive platform to perform automated testing for Web UI, Web services, API services, and mobile.
Selenium
Selenium is an open-source software testing tool. It supports most mainstream browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer. Selenium WebDriver is used to automate web application testing.
Conclusion
Successful continuous testing is a competitive advantage, enabling businesses to deliver value to their customers with higher quality faster. However, it is not an easy task to make the jump to continuous testing, and if you’re not aware of the basic tenets of it, you may find yourself headed for disaster. So make sure you have a strategic planning process in place before incorporating continuous testing into your organization.
Resources: www.katalon.com
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