Quality Engineering Done Right With Continuous Testing and DevOps

A few years ago, the product development cycle involved rigorous testing done near the end of the cycle, before the product release, which increased the duration of the product to reach the market as defect management was largely time-consuming. Enterprises shifted from the old waterfall model to the agile method for better results in attaining stability, which involved testing the products from an earlier period in the cycle.

The DevOps method is an extension of the Agile Method, which involves manual and automation testing from a very earlier development stage right from product creation until the final completion, involving closer ties with the Development and the Operations team.

Organizations would do well to gear up towards the process of Quality Engineering instead of just Quality Assurance, to improve the testing process through the progression method, that’s popularly known as continuous testing. This will help evaluate, test, automate and correct a product right from the beginning of the development cycle until the final stage where the product is deployed which is the definite case with DevOps as well.

Why Continuous Testing? How Should It Be Approached?

In this Cloud computing Era, it is considered to be the best choice for organizations to implement DevOps methodology with Continuous Testing to sustain the Digital transformation pace.

Implementing Continuous Testing in a systematic manner can help organizations achieve a steady progress with ‘fail fast’ methodology, to provide fast and continuous feedback, to automate end-to-end testing, to act as a gatekeeper for a product, and to provide metrics on Development Efficiency.

Continuous Testing can be risky when it’s not implemented in a pragmatic manner; hence the best way to implement continuous testing is in a templated approach. This approach can be attained by assigning certain parameters to all the main dimensions of DevOps. Continuous testing being one of the most flexible dimensions, categorizing the parameters and deciding the further build progress based on the parameters, helps in acute visualization and selecting the right tools and the best practices for testing.

Utilizing the Parameters to Make a Templated Approach

Implementing Continuous testing in an agile paced environment is quite a risk and making a templated approach like planning the right practices and procedures to successfully design, develop, test and release a product is accomplished by dividing them into parameters. The parameters to visualize the product development methods are Distribution, Technology, Scale and Load, Environments & Security and Release.

The best way to make a templated approach to continuous testing through these parameters can be explained with use-case scenarios such as:

• In-House Development - An internal application development that is used on premise and for internal uses. (.NET)

• A Hosted Public Facing Service - Assuming an application build with LAMP stack

• Product Development - A product development pipeline that is being developed by one team, customized and supported by geo-separate teams.

• A SaaS Service - A multi-purpose tenant SaaS Service where everything is managed automatically on demand.

The aspects of these parameters imbibed in the use-cases are explained in detail and more on making a templated approach are touched upon in this webinar about Continuous testing in an agile paced DevOps Environment.

Highlights of the Continuous Testing Approach

There are certain trends and concepts related to continuous testing in an agile-based DevOps environment, through which we can sustain in making continuous testing successful and possible in our DevOps environment.

Implementing continuous testing in a DevOps environment can be quite contrary to the old testing methods, and to tighten the process we might have to follow-up on some of the methodical trends. Quite a few of the concepts for continuous testing are ATDD: Acceptance Test-Driven Development, Distributed testing, Fail-Fast Strategy, Regression Strategy, Test Automation, API Driven testing, Gatekeeper Strategies, Supporting Product Variations and Combinations, Metrics, and Analytics on CD.

Some of the testing methods used for continuous testing are Functional and Regression, Usability, Performance Testing, Security, Continuous Integration, API and Mobile test Automation. The best tools to opt for under each category are mentioned in detail in the Webinar.

Situations Where DevOps Is Involved

The Development and Operations together form close ties to make DevOps manageable. It's a process where the complicated stages of development are engaged along with testing, and the DevOps engineers make their contribution to testing by learning and actively participating.

The places where DevOps teams contribute are:

• Enabling automatic testing and results management.

• Manage failures and trigger appropriate action items.

• Provisioning infrastructure specific to testing and providing the intelligence for the systems to scale and distribute.

• Enable testing combinations of module and products.

• Build pipelines that span across all functions of development.

An approach that serves Continuous Testing!

The main aspects and possibilities of 'Continuous Testing in an agile paced DevOps Environment' are discussed by our top Testing Experts in the webinar at Brighttalk, to help you better understand how we approach Continuous Testing and our respective solutions in detail.

Click Here to View the Webinar.