Why Continuous Testing Deserves More Credit from the IT Industry

1. Why continuous testing deserves more credit from the IT industry

2. Introduction “Digital acceleration can’t happen without better-quality software, and software testing matters more than ever for quality at speed.” This quote by the leading analyst, Forrester, cannot be more true. While global enterprises have accelerated their digital adoption amid the COVID-19 pandemic, it is essential that they do not leave software testing out of the picture. If truth be told, software testing is what will offer a flawless end result. Without it, all the enterprises will be left with our huge amounts of wasted efforts on unaesthetic strokes and a non-appealing end picture. When Agile and DevOps methodology were introduced, it was believed that the Waterfall practices are being left behind for good. Agile promised to bring in speed within the software development life cycle, while DevOps was supposed to enhance cross-department collaboration by eliminating silos. Together, Agile and DevOps showed the mettle to lead highly collaborative and accelerated SDLCs that would shorten the time-to-market by pushing releases into production faster than ever. Amidst all the frenzy of an exciting new way of developing software, the IT teams forgot about the most critical, yet most overlooked function – software testing. As a result, the adoption of the new and exciting methodologies failed tremendously leading to the belief among several organizations that DevOps or Agile is not for them. If only they had paid attention to the testing part.

3. What is continuous testing? In laymen terms, continuous testing means to test continuously at every stage of the software development life cycle. Continuous testing goes beyond the shift-left strategy that implied the initiation of testing early in the life cycle. Rather, it is about shifting left as well as right, implying to test everywhere. Therefore, continuous testing can be defined as a strategy to start testing early along with the beginning of the development, and then continue testing at each stage as the SDLC progresses toward the release and deployment. Continuous testing coupled with automation ensures that the developed software is always in a releasable state, excelling in terms of quality and offering visibility into the business risk coverage.

4. Benefits of continuous testing • Early detection of defects: As testing starts early on, the defects are caught earlier.  • Continuous feedback mechanism: The ‘test everywhere’ strategy helps in creating a continuous feedback loop that allows continuous improvement in the code.  • Shorter time-to-market: When the software testing process take place in parallel to the development, significant time is saved.  • Lower costs, higher quality: Continuous testing and continuous feedback ensures higher quality code releases, which in turn reduces the overall costs of development and testing.  • Faster releases: As testing assumes the role of a facilitator, rather than a bottleneck, releases get accelerated.  • Delighted customers: A defect-free and smooth application translates into happy customers.  • Lower business risks: Lower defects and high test coverage significantly reduces the business risks.  • Higher productivity: With faster feedback, debugging also happens faster and easily, resulting in enhanced productivity.  • Read Full Blog at: https://www.cigniti.com/blog/continuous-testing-devops-test-automation/