Learn how to enhance your continuous testing strategy as part of your DevOps process to make your team work faster and more efficiently.
The Table of Contents
1. Include a feedback loop from the start.
2. Make full use of your test automation suite.
3. Prepare to be adaptable – and persistent.
4. Experiment with headless browsers.
5. Make use of your whole DevOps team
The main point.
Continuous testing is an important component of the DevOps approach. It's nearly comprehensive in nature, focused on communication across coworkers and teams to get the greatest results. The DevOps lifecycle comprises the following steps:
- Continuous integration
- Continuous testing
- Continuous delivery
- Continuous deployment
Continuous testing enables you to offer web and mobile applications to your clients more quickly. It offers developers with faster feedback, allowing them to bypass the feared bottleneck between development and testing. It also enables the production of higher-quality code because it is tested after each integration with the main source repository.
All of this implies that your team may work more quickly and effectively – even from home if they have an efficient IP router and internet connection – but your continuous testing must be up to a high standard, not just a checkbox in DevOps best practices.
1. Include a feedback loop from the start.
Remember how we mentioned DevOps is all about communication? Well, you'll need to do a lot of stuff within your business. Before you can begin a successful continuous testing process, make sure that every team participating in the process is in the loop.
As a result, cooperation improves, and everyone is focused on a single goal: releasing your latest product in its finest shape. Hopefully, they'll keep chatting and offering new views to problem-solving, leaving you with some unexpected answers that might propel you to the top of your field.
2. Make full use of your test automation suite.
There are Important Advantages of Automation Testing for an Effective Product Release and remember that a test automation suite is at the core of continuous testing. This enables you to design and run automated checks on the code as it is written at each level of the DevOps process. However, it might be tempting to create your test suite using only a few tools, possibly because they are the ones you are accustomed to using.
Many people have tried to compel Selenium to do API-level checks and have been disappointed with the results. It's important to keep in mind that Selenium doesn't work at the web service level in this situation, thus the action you're attempting to do is unlikely to get the desired results.
Consider whether there is a better tool for the job - perhaps Postman or Paw will work better for you. Then there's the risk of overlooking important functionality in applications you currently use! There are several test automation packages that provide a range of benefits, and it's easy to get carried away and add program after program to your suite.
Google Meet, for example, makes it simple to set up online teleconferencing, which is essential in today's distant working world.
Why not allow your engineers to understand the intricacies of each new software you introduce? This might include taking courses or reading up on the program, interacting with mentors, or simply playing around with it until they understand its potential and limitations.
Regular test preparation for topics like DevOps in the cloud will keep your team up to speed and ready to face any challenge.
3. Prepare to be adaptable – and persistent.
Continuous testing is a principle rather than a set of rules. Because it all relies on what you're creating and the tools you're using, your version of continuous testing is going to look quite different from the next person's.
There are common end goals – finding and addressing issues early in the development cycle and generating software at a faster rate than would otherwise be possible – but there are virtually infinite ways to achieve them.
This implies that one of the most important strategies to enhance your continuous testing is to trust your teams and walk down paths that may appear confusing or odd.
One general guideline is that your DevOps team should be able to create workflows to automate previously manual testing, with the results stored in a centralized repository. This helps your team to keep track of which issues are popping up and solve them before they become a major issue.
Once problems have been discovered, the persistence phase begins. Not in the sense of 'stubbornly attempting something that isn't working,' but rather in the sense that the whole DevOps team is focused on product-based goals rather than project-based ones.
Having the entire team think about broad goals means you'll likely collect more data and insights at various phases of the development cycle. Then you'll be able to anticipate future problems before they occur.
4. Experiment with headless browsers.
Headless browsers, such as Puppeteer, HTML Unit, and Headless Chrome, enable you to perform browser tests without requiring a user interface (UI) or graphical user interface (GUI) (GUI). They should be part of your testing approach for every online application.
This is very beneficial for scaling continuous testing since it allows the tests to run more efficiently. Headless browsers need less RAM and processing resources to execute and provide results considerably faster than their standard UI and GUI competitors.
This rapid feedback is an important aspect of continuous testing because it helps developers to detect and solve issues before they take root and become entangled in a tangle of code.
These free tools allow you to use JavaScript to do performance auditing, accessibility testing, and unit testing — potentially making continuous testing more accessible to your staff.
Building a CCaaS platform requires the creation of a faultless final product: clients will demand a streamlined experience from start to finish. Continuous testing and headless browsers are critical in this case, not least since the customer service software sector is evolving at a quick speed.
5. Make use of your whole DevOps team
Blending development and operations is all about a unified strategy in which every team member participates in testing. This may involve UX professionals as well.
The ultimate aim for everyone on the team is to deliver a fantastic product, and in order to do so, your team must continually create, test, rebuild, and test again. There is shared accountability for the quality of the end product or project, and key performance indicators should be considered by everyone, not just a chosen few.
That means you won't simply have QA testers; you should have a team of people ready to work together to guarantee the objective is fulfilled, even if it means using a cloud communications tool to communicate remotely.
Similarly, your QA testers must be adaptable: they must be able to comfortably transition from one stage of the pipeline to the next, from development to deployment. That implies they should be able to do a wide range of tasks, ranging from Container Concepts to Infrastructure Automation.
The main point
A smooth continuous testing process is all about trusting your teams and keeping your project's purpose in mind from the start. Your teams must be allowed to investigate a program's capabilities and propose novel solutions to issues.
They must also trust one another, bringing different specialities and experience to the table, and feel comfortable sharing their thoughts. After all, DevOps is a style of working, not a simple application that can be installed and used. Create a dependable, well-optimized process, and you'll be on to a winner.
In this asptect, TestQuality is the first test management system designed to integrate into your DevOps workflow and tools. TestQuality also includes features to create and organize test cases in a global test repository - with preconditions, steps, attachments, and more. All this, in a collaborative testing environment seamlessly integrated with your DevOps workflow with powerful live analytics to help you to identify the quality of your testing effort, test coverage, high value tests, unreliable tests, and release readiness.
Yes, in fact working with the tools you already use is TestQuality's wheelhouse. TestQuality is designed around a live integration core. This live two-way core allows TQ to communicate directly with GitHub and Jira in real-time linking issues and requirements with the key tools in your DevOps workflows. TestQuality's integration engine also allows you to connect to pull in automated test results from popular CI/CD, Test Automation, and Unit Testing systems.