Living in the age of agile demands to be equipped with tools and techniques that empower to be agile. Companies are striving hard to be agile to gain the edge to be ahead of their competitors but to be fully agile they have to deal with a challenge of implementing changes and additions to their Software systems that offer their services to customers. The response of the customers and acceptance of the product is, otherwise, dependent on the factor that how early the product launches in the market.
Continuous Delivery (CD) is one such concept that has been empowering organisations to be agile fully and reduce the time to market, however, leveraging the full potential of CD hinges on successful automation of CD pipeline. Continuous Integration (CI) has been the first step towards achieving Continuous Delivering, but there a missing link for it, then Continuous Testing has evolved to act as a bridge between CI and CD.
Digitalization has disrupted Software Development, demanding for faster development and testing cycles. Continuous development and continuous bug fixing has become trivial to reach customers faster, which implied the need of Continuous Testing (CT) to evolve. The diligence in Continuous Testing implementation improves Software release cycles thus reducing the time to market and bringing better ROI.
Let’s First Understand What Continuous Testing is?
Years ago, agile has evolved to drive faster Dev sprints leaving testing behind and this impacted in pulling down the face of development instead of bolstering it. So, companies who adopted Agile to speed up Software delivery ended up gleaning the half benefits of being agile. Then came DevOps, an aptly named concept to address the need of automation in software development along with Agile. Continuous Testing in DevOps empowered testing practice to align its pace with Dev and Ops, which lead to achieving the business goals such as faster time to market, reduced cost and improved Software quality.
The key principles of continuous testing include testing early, testing often, testing faster and automating those tests. To dig deeper into how continuous testing works, let’s take its workflow – when a build reaches the test environment with a CI tool like Jenkins, instead of running regression test suites manually automating the execution by triggering the execution from CI tool enables to achieve the key principles of continuous testing.
Continuous Testing has the key role in DevOps which encourages involvement and collaboration of developers, QA engineers and release engineers to improve Software quality with time to market. This form of testing symbolises continual feedback mechanism, and focuses straightaway on prevention of the problem than its detection. For a smooth continuous testing, it is necessary that each small step undergoes automation in the process.
Continuous Testing Contribution in Achieving “Faster time to Market”
Agile and digitalization demanded proliferated software releases’ frequency and this process became the tool to accelerate software releases without compromising on quality. This helped companies to achieve faster time to market. In this agile world, faster time to market is being the ultimate goal for businesses, continuous testing can improve the effectiveness in identifying bugs faster and it can also enhance the readiness of companies to respond quickly and mitigate business risks.
Continuous Testing can empower Software Development process to be adaptive for changes even in production environments, helping defect identification process to speed up and bringing down the overall cost.
