The Key Role of Continuous Testing in DevOps

Regular practices are being adopted by IT organizations to enable frequent software releases to production, to increase the overall customer experience and to accelerate time to market.

However, adopting DevOps practices requires a cultural shift in terms of processes, people, and technologies that are involved in development, testing and operations. These days, various organizations are encountering significant challenges while embracing DevOps.

According to popular belief, an organization must throw away everything an organization has built and start from scratch. However, that is not true; the critical component of DevOps in large organizations is the need to improve collaboration & communication between IT teams disciplines.

Enabling a behavior like this can be cumbersome, particularly while regulatory and audit compliance requires current administrative structures to remain as-is.

Traditionally, developers, testers, and operation engineers typically play diverse roles, with varying responsibilities, cultures, job descriptions, and all working in distinct functional areas as separate entities.

The question that arises is whether QA can unite these various groups under the DevOps flag or not.

Continuous Integration & Delivery (CI and CD) are the two most important components of DevOps practice. Continuous integration being the main component of agile practice ensures that software is built and tested regularly and the bugs are also fixed rapidly.

It necessitates members of a team to integrate their work regularly on a daily basis. Each check-in is corroborated by an automated build that will allow an early defect detection. As continuous integration identifies defects early in the development, defects become easy to resolve and less complex.

Continuous delivery helps in taking continuous integration to the next level and extend agile practice beyond development in a DevOps cycle. It plays a crucial role in today’s agile age.

Continuous delivery helps in making it continuously adapt software corresponding to changes in the business strategy, user feedback, and shifts in the market.

In a continuous delivery process, the teams collaborate and work closely to streamline and automate the test, build, and release cycles. A successful continuous delivery process helps in reducing costs, shortening iterations, minimizing risks, and accelerating time to market.

Importance of Continuous Testing in DevOps

To provide seamless user experience to the customers, applications need an extraordinary dependence and connectivity between systems, processes, and infrastructure. Testing various products, applications, and services can pose a huge challenge for testing needs to ensure that high-quality software is delivered at an accelerated speed.

Continuous testing plays an imperative role in continuous delivery. It involves the use of concepts and methods of Agile development for the testing and QA process, providing extra efficient testing process. 

Continuous testing necessitates on automated end-to-end testing solutions that incorporate existing development processes while eliminating errors and enabling thorough continuity throughout the software development lifecycle.