Accelerating Software Delivery by Implementing Continuous Testing

In today's economy, many organizations are adopting innovative ways to deliver software to the market to compete with the competition. As part of this innovation, software development teams are finding new ways to increase agility and test teams are ensuring that quality software is developed and tested at an equal pace. To align with equal speed, test teams need to focus on continuous testing practices that enable test teams to keep up with agile development practices with effective quality assurance services.

Also Read A Quick Comparison Between Functional and Non Functional Testing

What Are The Essential Elements For Continuous Testing?

The following elements are necessary to obtain continuous testing:

Risk Assessment: The best practice is to assess the project risk upfront by which we measure if we have done enough testing and allow the software to release.

1. Business Related Risks

2. Technical Debt

3. Coverage

Requirements Traceability 

When a modified code exists, most faults are more likely to be introduced. To mitigate this, you have to come up with a change impact analysis matrix that helps to identify the test cases affected due to changes in the system..

Shift-Left 

To identify problems in software development by first testing in the delivery lifecycle, you should focus on shift-left quality practice from the first day of the project. To minimize defects in later stages, the integration test omitted in the build level process is needed. This elegant approach to continuous testing is the result of delivering a high-quality product to the market.

Automated Testing 

Complex systems are usually built on multiple applications and all these applications exchange information through different platforms. Manual testing for these applications and processes slows down testing and causes delays in results. Implementation of functional automation and performance testing can reduce the challenges of testing highly integrated applications in complex software systems.

Test Optimization: Continuous testing is not possible by just automating unit, component, integration, functional, performance and security testing activities. To achieve test optimization, a similar workflow must be established at the beginning of the project with associated processes and policies.

Service Virtualization 

Entities that rely on interconnected systems must be able to validate changes more quickly and effectively, not only for integration issues but also for risks associated with performance and security aspects. By taking advantage of service virtualization, organizations can validate continuous changes. Service virtualization brings high-quality products to market, faster and at lower cost

Conclusion

Continuous testing enables organizations to deliver quality software through automated testing, continuous feedback at each stage of STLC and rapid delivery of products with new features in the market.