Why is Continuous Integration important to achieve Continuous Testing?

Continuous Testing

The DevOps and Agile based culture of software development has led to faster builds, quick validation and delivery, instant feedback loops, cost savings, and holding onto the competitive edge. This culture has brought in components like Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) to address the industry need for developing and delivering better quality software at a faster rate. In fact, CI/CD is fast becoming the industry standard for software development as opposed to the traditional waterfall model.

The digitaltransformation initiatives embraced by businesses to reach out to their target customers effectively have brought the quality of a product to the centre stage. Earlier, it was majorly about the quantity of a product to be gobbled up by voracious customers who wanted an online experience. This mentality has undergone a change as of today. As customers have developed an appetite for quality software that works seamlessly without any of its features taking a hit, businesses perforce had to do a rethink. This rethink is about changing their priorities and supplanting quality over quantity. The demand for quantity has been addressed in the form of accelerating the time to market. In short, the Agile led culture has helped in developing and deploying quality software products quickly to beat or stay put in the competition.

This is where the Agile and DevOps methodologies have become the de facto industry standards to meet the changing market dynamics. These methodologies lead to the following -

·         Developing and testing the product in a common build and test cycle

·         Identifying and eliminating glitches in the build and test cycle

·         Increasingly using test automation to hasten the testing process and enhancing the test coverage area

·         Integrating the software components in the development sprint

·         Deploying software only when it has been validated for quality

·         Receiving customer feedbacks and updating the product based on them

The thrust of DevOps is built on doing continuous testing of the software to identify glitches during the build stage itself. For should the glitches are identified later, the cost of correcting the same will be enormous not to speak of the complexities involved. Continuous integration, besides validating the software for quality, provides project insights in the form of producing a slew of dashboard reports for the stakeholders to take a peek at and analyse. If continuous integration testing is about shift left testing, its ultimate deliverable in the form of continuous delivery falls towards the right. Below mentioned are the five steps that DevOps specialists can undertake to make sure continuous testing performs as per the expected lines regarding the continuous delivery of products. 

1. Communicating the changes: Once the delivery metrics are known and customer preferences are taken into account, the development, QA and Operations teams should put the codes through the Continuous Delivery pipeline. This way, by using a test automation suite, you can hasten the testing and integration processes at a lesser cost and risk. Moreover, you can also add an incremental value to your customers by moving to the shift left method of development and testing. The traditional waterfall method leaves a lot to be desired due to its myriad shortcomings.

2. Monitoring the KPIs: The next part of the continuous testing solutions is about monitoring the changes that have been incorporated into the software as per the feedback loop. It is prudent to use a tracker for the stakeholders to monitor the KPIs and collaborate across the delivery process. 

3. Automate the build: The entire development and testing processes should be automated to achieve outcomes such as efficiency and cost effectiveness, reusing the build, quicker identification of glitches, expanding the test area, and generating specific reports for the stakeholders to analyze and implement solutions. 

4. Self-testing build: This is done by creating software builds as and when a code is generated. The QA team can analyse the changes that led to the code being generated and address any glitch quickly. 

5. Code testing: The automated generated code is tested as per the metrics to see if it matches up to the expected outcome. Besides, the dashboard reports on API guide the QA teams to analyse and enforce the quality standard of the code. 

Conclusion

The above mentioned steps help set up and execute an automated build for code development, integration, testing, and delivery. It is only when continuous integration testing is carried out in right earnest that the product passes muster on the benchmark of quality.

This Article is originally published at Medium.com, Ensuring Continuous Integration with Continuous Testing.