Continuous Testing for Agile and DevOps: Trends and Recommendations

As software becomes the key to creating a competitive advantage across all markets, enterprises no longer enjoy the luxury of selecting either ‘speed’ or ‘quality’ when delivering software. Both are critical. Now that agile practices have matured and DevOps initiatives have entered the corporate agenda, Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Testing (CT) and Continuous Delivery (CD) have emerged as key catalysts for enabling quality at speed. Of the three, Continuous Testing is by far the most challenging.

While Continuous Integration is primarily a tool-driven activity and Continuous Delivery is a tool- and team-driven activity, Continuous Testing involves tools, teams, individuals, and services. Building and integrating code changes is certainly important. However, if the automated delivery process cannot identify how changes impact business risk or disrupt the end-user experience, then the increased frequency and speed of CI and CD could become more of a liability than an asset.

Executed correctly, Continuous Testing serves as the centerpiece of the agile downstream process – executing automated tests as part of the software delivery pipeline in order to provide risk-based feedback as rapidly as possible. Mastering Continuous Testing is essential for controlling business risk given the increased complexity and pace of modern application delivery.

How can you overcome the challenges of Continuous Testing? What testing best practices are critical for achieving DevOps objectives? The new Gartner report Continuous Testing for Agile and DevOps: Trends and Recommendations provides some insights.

Some key takeaways from this report include:

• Organizations that expect to thrive in a digital business environment must overcome time constraints and resource requirements while ensuring the quality and stability of their releases. This requires focus on agile methodologies, automation, and collaboration.
• DevOps will gradually permeate traditional enterprises that struggle to manage increasing business demand and rapid change brought about by digital business and bimodal strategies.
• Interchangeability is key to the success of the DevOps toolchain; the freedom to add and remove tools as your projects and requirements change is critical for a sustainable and optimized pipeline.
• No single-vendor “DevOps” solution is going to solve all of an organization’s acceleration needs; this approach ultimately leads to disappointment. Instead, look to establish an easily integrated and flexible “best of breed” toolchain that spans development, testing, management, and delivery.
• To transform software delivery in a way that advances top-level digital business objectives, technical teams ultimately need to be more responsive to the business. Digital transformation is not just a “Dev and Ops thing,” but rather, a “business DevOps” thing.

The complete report also includes Gartner’s insights on:

• What’s required (from a quality perspective) to extend from Agile and Continuous Integration to Continuous Delivery and DevOps.
• New sets of tools emerging to address management functions (such as monitoring and continuous build, integration, and testing) specific to the DevOps philosophy.
• How the DevOps toolchain will evolve over the next 5 years…and the top 7 threats to effective DevOps adoption.