Customers nowadays expect top-notch software for their businesses or personal use. To accommodate that need, software companies are incorporating Continuous Testing practices to ensure the software they release to market can outshine the competition.
What is Continuous Testing?
Simply put, Continuous Testing is a software testing type in which the product is evaluated early, often, and throughout the entire Continuous Delivery (CD) process. It uses automated tests to ensure teams receive immediate feedback to quickly mitigate as many risks as possible throughout the software development life cycle. Moreover, team members are able to continuously learn about their product and what can be done to increase quality and reliability.
Incorporating continuous testing into your organization is not a simple procedure, however, as you need to build out a test strategy to ensure a smooth transition.
You also asked why is it so valuable? Imagine this: Traditionally, testing software is only successful after developers have finished writing code and sent to the Quality Assurance department for independent testing. After successfully finding bugs, developers automatically receive the failing code to fix. This testing model is relatively functional. However, it is risky, disrupted, and time-consuming. Instead, businesses nowadays require fast delivery of high-quality products.
But what if there was a different avenue for testing? A faster and more efficient way that eliminated bottlenecks between different departments?
That is where continuous testing becomes valuable. Testing code directly after submitting it to the repository helps detect bugs before programmers write any additional code. So you don’t have to adjust that extra code to incorporate bug fixes. Talk about saving time!
Benefits of Continuous Testing
- Find errors: Ensure you find as many errors before a widespread release.
- Test early and often: Testing throughout the development, delivery, testing, and deployment cycles
- Accelerate testing: Run parallel performance tests to increase testing execution speed
- Earn customer loyalty: Accomplish continuous improvement and quality
- Automation: Automate your test cases to decrease time spent testing
- Increase release rate: Speed up delivery to production and release faster
- Reduce business risks: Assess potential problems before they become an actual problem
- DevOps: Incorporates into your DevOps processes smoothly
- Communication transparency: Eliminate silos between the development, testing, and operations teams
- Available testing tools: Available tools supporting this testing practice make the testing process easier, faster, and more reliable
Main Challenges of Continuous Testing
While continuous testing has a myriad of key benefits, there are several challenges that software development teams must take into consideration:
- Adjust to DevOps: Professionals don’t process the right tools and training within Agile and DevOps environments
- Change in culture: Cultural shifts among your development and testing teams may happen while maintaining traditional processes.
- Update testing strategy: Maintaining only traditional testing methods and test data management prevents continuous testing from reaching its full potential
- Code integration: Developers who don’t integration their code on a regular basis (recommended several times daily) create defect issues with duplicated coding efforts and non-compatible code
- Test environments: Make sure your test environments work within your code repository base for seamless testing of the newest available code
- Production environments: Also, make sure your production environments reflect the test environment to ensure every area was properly tested
Key Components of Continuous Testing
Let’s break down the key components of continuous testing and determine if it would work for your organization.
Test Automation
Manual testing is laborious and time-intensive. Meanwhile, automation gives time back to your engineers to actually fix the bugs found during testing. Now, not everything should be automated. Exploratory testing does play a crucial role to creatively find ways to test. And those test scenarios in exploratory testing? Automate them!
Testers cannot execute continuous testing without test automation. The best part about test automation is the quick feedback the team receives. Specifically, it allows early and often feedback to adjust code timely before releasing features to the market.
Do you see the connection? The ideal aspect of continuous testing is to have it triggered and executed without human intervention. This is the ultimate goal of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery.
Continuous Integration
The CI/CD pipeline is an essential part of continuous testing. Let’s talk about continuous integration (CI). This practice gathers code from developers working on one project and placing it into a code repository, which may generate a lot of bugs. This is where continuous testing comes into play. Automating your test executions as soon as integrating the code will allow you to find bugs as early as possible and fix them faster. Therefore, find bugs before releasing the application to production, you can save yourself a lot of time, money, and effort to fix at a later date.
Continuous Delivery
Continuous Delivery (CD) may be confused with continuous deployment. A great way to think about the difference is continuous delivery is having any code version ready to deploy to production. Both practices require you to work on small, frequent changes. However, we believe continuous delivery is an integral part of continuous testing because you should test code before it is deployed. Having code ready to go without thoroughly testing is a waste of resources and should be acted upon immediately. Continuously test your code!
Want to dive deeper into CI/CD? Check out our previous blog for 5 best reasons why companies should adopt CI/CD.
How to Perform Continuous Testing
Now that you know the definition, benefits and limitations, let’s talk about how you use it. Continuous testing should be implemented at every stage of your CI/CD pipeline. You can set up test suites at every point code changes, merges, or releases. Likewise, you can run tests at a specific point rather than every test at once. This will help reduce time and effort on testing but still reap quality rewards.
Continuous testing works best by using the most recent build in an isolated environment. For instance, containerization is a great method to help with replicating code outside of the main code repository. There are many useful tools that accelerates this type of automation testing discussed in the next section.
Continuous Testing Tools for Agile Teams
Selenium
Selenium is an open-source software testing tool. It supports most mainstream browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer. Selenium WebDriver is used to automate web application testing.
Selenium is a go-to choice for Quality Assurance (QA) engineers with an advanced level of programming skill. It requires a deep understanding of how frameworks work to set up and implement current development cycles.
Jenkins
Jenkins is a continuous integration tool using Java language and is configurable via both GUI interface and console commands. This platform is packaged with a range of plugins available for setting up, deploying, and automating your software development projects on Linux, Windows, and macOS operating systems.
Katalon Studio
Katalon Studio is built on top of Selenium. This tool offers a comprehensive platform to perform automated testing for Web UI, API, Desktop and Mobile applications mobile. Katalon Studio is available for testers with two options:
- Katalon Studio (Free): for individual users with basic test automation features. Free Download
- Katalon Studio Enterprise (Licensed): for teams and advanced users with exclusive features for large-scale usage. If users registered with business email domains, they will receive a one-month free trial.
Travis CI
Travis CI is a continuous testing tool hosted on GitHub offering hosted and on-premise variants. It automatically executes tests whenever you commit to a GitHub repository. In other words, it identifies broken commits very quickly and fixes in no time. Surprisingly, Travis CI supports 21 languages ranging from Node, PHP, Python, R, Ruby, Java, Perl, to C, C#, C++, etc. It provides testers with two options:
- For open-source projects: available for download at travis-ci.org.
- For private projects: available for download at travis-ci.com.
Conclusion
In short, continuous testing is beneficial in so many ways, but it can also be very challenging. Thereby make sure you have a solid plan in place before incorporating this testing procedure into your organization. After that, adopting a strategies with each team regarding how to build it into their procedures can keep the testing flow seamlessly throughout the development process. This involves eliminating the silos between each team – yes, developers, testers, and operations will now have to work together! It’s all for the greater good.
Originally published at https://www.katalon.com/resources-center/blog/continuous-testing-introduction/