According to a survey by ‘Markets and Markets,’ as the need for mobile application testing is rising, the continuous testing market is expected to surge from 1.15 billion in 2018 to 2.41 billion by 2023. Signifying the need to deliver quality software faster. The demand for continuous testing has increased as the demand for high-quality mobile apps has grown. Companies are investing in digital transformation to improve their business capabilities. As a result, they reduce the risks associated with business and software assets by adopting continuous testing.
What is Continuous Testing?
Continuous testing is a DevOps software testing methodology that entails testing at all stages of the software testing life cycle. As part of the continuous delivery process, it assesses the software at deep unit levels by testing early and regularly. App development in today’s world necessitates timely, high-quality releases. Quick quality checks at each development stage are possible with continuous integration, preventing any unwanted invitation to bugs at later stages.
Software changes flow from development to testing to deployment in a continuous DevOps process. After each change, the developers run automated tests that provide feedback on the build quality as a test result. The Development team, DevOps team, and Quality Assurance team are all active in Continuous Testing. Here are four key elements that a full continuous testing solution should involve to make an effective continuous test strategy:
1. Streamlining the test process
Effective Continuous testing is capable of recognizing business risks (both internal and external), determining ways to alleviate bottlenecks, and improving tests. Because test restrictions obstruct quality and speed, it’s critical to understand them throughout the testing process.
Testers, for example, would be unable to establish acceptance criteria if they were not included in backlog refinement. This causes a delay in getting the bugs fixed. Automated test suites take too long to complete, and post-production checks are largely done manually.
2. Optimizing tests
One of the most important parts of a successful test automation approach for continuous testing is test optimization. Teams select the appropriate tests to ensure optimum test coverage with the fewest possible tests. Prior to test automation, test optimization should always be performed, and it should continue throughout the test process phases. Understanding integrations in user processes, as well as the technology used by the app, is the first step in test optimization. Test case optimization comprises a quality review of the test cases and delivers maximum test coverage with a smaller number of tests. This is a dynamic feature of test optimization that ensures that tests are assessed consistently in order to keep the test suite optimized. Optimization involves discarding those tests which are no longer needed, dealing with flaky tests, and creating new tests for new features.
3. Automate continuous testing throughout the CI pipeline:
Throughout the delivery cycle, test automation must support continuous testing. Test automation speeds up deployment while also lowering the risk of disrupting continuous delivery. However, in this context, automation does not only refer to the creation and maintenance of an automated regression test suite. To improve the continuous delivery process, continuous test automation testing necessitates a thorough plan. Checkpoints should be included in the strategy at each level of the construction process. Automation testing is also used in post-deployment sanity tests to ensure that the apps are working properly and to identify any functional or performance issues that may arise.
The plan for continuous test automation should be efficient, dependable, consistent, and reproducible findings, as well as a test maintenance schedule for performing specified automated tests at specific points along the CI pipeline.
4. Shift left
The most important part of quality engineering is the shift-left method, which is responsible for developing a successful continuous testing strategy by introducing testing as early as feasible and assuring quality throughout the development process. The goal of quality engineering is to keep the development process as good as possible by preventing problems at all stages and enabling continuous testing.
TDD (test-driven development), BDD (behavior-driven development), and ATDD (adaptive test-driven development) are some of the techniques utilized in the Shift-Left methodology (Acceptance test-driven development).
5. Ensuring Quality is a team Responsibility
Unless all team members understand how critical their roles are in maintaining quality, it will not be possible to be able to successfully implement the continuous testing strategy. For example during cross-browser testing, it must be ensured that a thorough research about the browsers and os used by customer base is on point wile designing and planning.
Conclusion:
Continuous testing strives to achieve continuous software quality and improvement earlier and more frequently. It eliminates all difficulties and ensures that the right tests are run at the right time at all phases of the SDLC. Continuous testing is not as simple as it sounds, but with the support of a solid strategy and tools for continuous testing, you can ensure a smooth integration into the process.
