With applications the driving force in today’s economy, the quality and release cadence of your software are critical to your business and your bottom line. You want to get software updated in the hands of your end users as quickly as possible. However, even the fastest release cycle wouldn’t make a difference if your product ends up being buggy or malfunctioning, resulting in a bad user experience or service interruption.

I want to take a look at one of the most important (if not the most important) aspects of the software delivery process: testing! As software teams become more mature in their implementation of DevOps and continuous delivery to streamline their software delivery, testing takes a central role as a prerequisite to these practices.

You need to have testing on your mind from the very beginning, and plan your testing as part of the initial stages of designing your software — mapping your test procedures, infrastructure configuration and acceptance criteria. As you design and develop your app, you also need to think about how you’re going to test it. The more testing is on your mind, the more you’ll have a solid understanding of what you need to test, what’s the definition of “done,” and the faster, more streamlined, your overall process will be.

For my recent article on DevOps.com, I review four questions every development or QA team should consider when planning their testing, as they try to balance quality with speed — managing and accelerating their testing, while ensuring a reasonable time-to-market.

1. How Much Testing is Enough?
2. What Kind of Testing Should You Invest in?
3. How Can You Make Testing Faster?
4. Where Do You Start if You Want to Make Sure All Your Builds Are Green?

Read the full article for tips for planning your testing, and 12 best practices for improving your testing processes.