The success of software products depends to a large extent on the timely control of market demand. Adopting DevOps can speed up product delivery and improve user experience, thereby helping to maintain an advantage over competitors.
As an extension of agile development methodology, DevOps emphasizes the collaboration and communication between different teams of development, testing and operation and maintenance.
Continuous integration and continuous testing is a process of building, testing a product, and fixing bugs in iterations. It helps teams find bugs early in the development phase, when bugs are usually less complex and easier to fix. Through continuous integration and continuous testing, businesses can minimize the risk of errors earlier and deliver better quality software faster.
The Benefits of Continuous Testing for Product Development in DevOps
● Regular risk analysis: You will have a build that has gone through all stages of testing, as continuous testing flags potential risks at each stage.
●Improve user experience: continuous testing to adapt to the dynamic needs of users. The team can continuously make updates based on feedback to make the product more robust, flexible, and reliable.
●Enhance product security: By creating support systems, applications can be protected from threats and malware.
● Plan Feedback: Assess all architectural layers of the delivery pipeline and share actionable feedback with the team.
● Higher resource utilization: As mentioned earlier, finding bugs early can save money and resources. Best practices in continuous testing and defect prevention strategies can be leveraged and valuable resources redeployed to other strategic development initiatives.
The Role of Continuous Testing in DevOps
In the DevOps process, continuous testing provides a continuous feedback mechanism that acts as a catalyst throughout the product delivery pipeline. Automatic feedback at each stage ensures that defects are addressed early in the development process.
Actionable feedback is necessary to enable the next process in the delivery chain. For example, if the feedback can be moved forward, the process will continue; if the feedback indicates that there is a problem, then the process needs to be suspended and corrective action taken.
Continuous testing by a professional testing team can assess business risks associated with software in real time. Additionally, it provides risk-based feedback that helps teams make better trade-off decisions.
The Practice of Continuous Testing in DevOps
1. Move left or right of the test
Traditional testing is mainly concentrated at the end of the software development cycle, before product release. In order to cater to the ever-accelerating delivery frequency, more and more teams' testing activities began to move to the left and right. Generally, software with high repair costs and enterprise-oriented fees will cause relatively large losses once a problem occurs in the production environment, and the method of shifting the test to the left is usually adopted; for software products with display functions, it is easier to find in the production environment problem, usually in the form of a test shift to the right. Facing the problem of test swinging left and right, this picture can be used to illustrate how the test in DevOps should be implemented.
Shifting testing to the left means that testers participate in various activities in the early stage of software projects earlier , define relevant test cases before function development, and discover quality problems in advance. Introducing the testing process early helps prevent defects and gives developers the flexibility to apply dynamic changes throughout the development phase .
Shifting the test to the right is to monitor directly in the production environment and obtain user feedback in real time. In this method, feedback is collected from the user side, and the user experience satisfaction of the product is continuously improved according to the user feedback to improve product quality . Shifting the test to the right helps to better respond to unexpected situations .
2. Continuous integration
The ideal DevOps cycle is one-click deployment from code development to production environment operation. Obviously DevOps attaches great importance to the automation of construction, testing and deployment, and the use of continuous integration has become the basis of continuous testing. An important step in achieving continuous testing is to create a comprehensive automated test suite for use in continuous integration builds, and the code will be verified by this automated test suite immediately after submission. A common automated test suite consists of unit tests, component detection, and acceptance tests. The code or function coverage of each test must be at least 80% to ensure that no regression problems are introduced.
3. Improve the efficiency of test coverage
The practice of DevOps calls for improving code coverage, increasing coverage for low-level availability so that when deploying to higher-level availability there will be no issues related to code coverage.
Some organizations default to "run all tests every time" to ensure code coverage. This not only wastes resources but also prolongs the test cycle, and there is no real guarantee of code coverage. Test what needs to be tested to save time, money and resources. Visualizing the model allows various paths to be explored and optimized to provide maximum coverage with only a small number of test cases. With the help of tools such as Rally, HP ALM and Zen Road ZTF, you can import test cases, remove duplicate use cases, and distribute optimized use cases.
4. Cross-departmental collaboration
Quality assurance in DevOps is no longer the exclusive responsibility of testers, but the direction that all personnel must work towards. The successful implementation of continuous testing is inseparable from intra-team, inter-team and cross-team collaboration. Testers need to intervene in the development work in advance and formulate test plans with developers; developers can participate in configuration deployment; operation and maintenance personnel can fill in test cases to the automated test case library; testers can configure automated test cases to the continuous delivery chain at any time In , the common purpose of all members is to deliver efficient and high-quality products .
DevOps breaks down the barriers between development and operations, shortening the development cycle. Among them, continuous integration, continuous testing, and continuous delivery are all key catalysts for improving quality, while continuous testing is more challenging. Continuous testing mastering the DevOps lifecycle plays a vital role in fully understanding DevOps.
