Fill the Gap Between CI and CD Pipelines With Continuous Testing

The ultimate goal of DevOps is speedy deliveries with same or better quality and there are many ways to achieve this. Among all, the most important ones are, collaborate and automate! The right blend of both can make the success story.

DevOps mindset says no more waiting of resources, fail fast, fail often, get rapid feedback and make faster deliveries. This need for speed in DevOps demands Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) pipelines. CI helps to ensure parallel development and quick integration, CD helps in quicker builds and releases. When both put together, it helps in shortening the overall delivery time.

A common outlook is, healthier the CI/CD pipelines, better the deployment frequency. While the fact is, there is a gap between CI and CD which cannot be overlooked. The gap can be filled with Continuous Testing (CT) to make the DevOps journey even smoother. If we detect the bugs early in the lifecycle, it is easier to fix them with least to no impact and hence effective testing is essential to deliver better products.

Measuring the Success of DevOps is very important and remember, good code coverage and test coverage can ensure thinner defect density!

Finding bugs, aka testing, can be a time-consuming process and requires precision. With DevOps, when you are trying to achieve faster releases and deployments by CI/CD pipelines, testing can become a bottleneck.

“Automation is the backbone of DevOps, why not use it in testing and make it Continuous Testing (CT) instead!

Automated tests provide continuous rapid feedback, kind of a safety net, which is required to add new features and make more releases.

Test early and test fast poses a serious challenge when working with Selenium. Testers cannot start with automation unless the application under test is ready and available. Clearly, you will miss the bus if you start with test automation only after the development is complete. Alternatively, you have to cut down on the testing coverage for the new build which may not be the smartest things to do.

Fortunately, there are tools out there which are changing the whole paradigm of testing. Moving far away from manual testing to automated testing to help you go truly Agile with Selenium! One such tool I have come across in the recent past is Qualitia which uses Selenium to rapidly build automation workflows using their scriptless approach. It also helps you perform interface validation, database validation, web services and all the way to file validation. Qualitia can significantly reduce maintenance efforts and save rework efforts because of end to end traceability and smart alert system. Yet another step in your DevOps journey towards continuous feedback!

So how are you planning to fill the gap between CI/CD Pipeline?

Disclaimer: All the views expressed on this blog solely belong to Prashant Arora and not of his current or past employer’s.