Implementing Continuous Testing as the Guardian of Quality
It’s safe when someone has your back.
Being there for someone is one thing, ensuring software quality attributes on a continuous basis for many users is another.
That’s where a bit of automation can help.
The act of testing will not guarantee testing in itself (your health will not improve depending on the frequency of blood tests), but still, to adapt.
Adaptation is necessary to survive in today’s ecosystem; having a fast adaptation capability is a competitive advantage for companies.
This article covers how continuous test automation lets you deliver and improve with more velocity, acting as a guardian of quality.
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Before continuous testing, just do testing
Continuous testing, DevOps, AI — all these paradigms are useful but need to start with the basics.
Continuous test automation requires foundations in test automation a number of organizations only have partially, if not at all.
The building blocks of test automation are:
- Requirements and test referential to describe test cases
- Test automation tool to configure the automated tests
- A test execution robot and environment to run the test
- Test reporting, even minimalist to start with.
These elements are necessary to execute a first set of automated tests, usually in a single testing environment.
Once in place, you can start testing earlier.
Testing earlier in upstream environments
Shift-left is the act of testing early and often along the software lifecycle, enabling to adapt faster and at a lower cost.
Continuous test automation can start upstream by executing tests in the first available environments: prototypes, development, first integrated environment.
Due to the ephemeral environments and requirements nature, the requirement of automated tests is to be fast to implement to execute.
Over time, more stable tests can be capitalized on, acting as the patterns of sanity checks — a set of verification before performing other actions.
Testing earlier is, however, not a guarantee that everything will be fine.
Testing in environments similar to production
Shift-right is the practice of complementing the deployment stages with testing activities approximating a production-like environment.
Continuous testing after the first test environments reinforce the confidence of software behavior integrated with other applications.
Test automation can takes various form at this stage:
- End-to-end non-regression campaign
- Performance tests such as load-test, spike test
- Security tests like penetration testing
The objectives are to verify non-functional requirements, end-to-end integrations of components and simulate inputs similar to the production ones.
And continuous testing can still be done alongside the users.
Testing before and with the users
Continuous monitoring, customer journeys, SRE are all terms pertinent in the context of testing in production what makes sense to be tested there.
We can try to emulate a copy of a production environment, there will still be differences.
This is why a part of continuous testing is to test in the production environments to detect early and correct fast any issue found.
Automated tests can be post-deployment production checks, customer journey monitoring, SRE metrics monitoring — all giving live feedback.
If you act on the shared domain, you will create your own Guardian of Quality.
Continuous Testing as a Guardian of Quality
The implementation of continuous test automation is a journey requiring the foundations in place and a series of incremental improvements.
There’s no shortcut to building a reliable Guardian of Quality, letting you deliver with more confidence and peace of mind.
One thing you can do is do it faster.
Choosing the right test automation tool at the beginning, covering different types of automated tests, with native reporting and integrations will ease your life.
When you need something, there’s no time lost in coding the features: you just use them and connect it to your environment.
That’s the toolbox we build at Cerberus Testing, the 100% open-source test automation platform to accelerate your delivery of valuable software.
Discover all the features and free access here.
Follow Cerberus Testing for more open-source test automation.
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Author: Antoine Craske
