From Test Early to Test Always

It has been quite some time since organizations have started the agile journey, and DevOps plays the role of the navigator to make the traversal faster and smoother. DevOps practices will equip the team to do more frequent software releases. This accelerated time to market, without any compromise on ‘Quality’ is key in improving the overall customer experience. This article is an attempt to sprinkle few thoughts to make sure we accomplish the same exhaustive testing done in pre-historic days, but at a faster pace and more often.

DevOps is all about focusing on rapid IT service delivery through the adoption, which means all that we do from a testing perspective should be rapid and in sync with all other phases in the software development life cycle. We have transitioned faster from an era of ‘testing late’ to ‘test early’, and progressed further to be at a stage where everything from the leftmost position need to be automated. This essentially means a shift from ‘stop and resume’ process to a ‘Continuous Process’, to accommodate the change. Following are the areas where the cycle of continuity needs to be driven to deliver and sustain.

• Continuous Integration & Continuous Testing
• Continuous Release and Deployment
• Continuous Monitoring

Continuous testing is synonymous to a continuous feedback mechanism, where the source code is tested as it is germinated. This will help the development team to promptly act to those early warnings, and eradicate the errors spending less effort. Automation thus becomes a key component of effective continuous testing, creating a platform for teams to quickly and efficiently analyse the functionality of the code churned out. Building automated test scripts can be an expensive and time-consuming endeavour, and cognizance need to be applied in identifying targets for automation. Our team based on the experience of working across multiple technologies, platforms and domains have structured continuous testing with a layered approach as below

The below figure illustrates the CT Ecosystem our team has leveraged for the product development initiative in the analytics space