What does making your bed have to do with continuous testing?

Making your bed to perfection in the morning is a way of creating something that welcomes you with clarity and cleanness when you return in the evening. No matter how chaotic your day has been. It’s a quite eloquent image of what continuous testing can do for your business.

My colleague, Jeff Scheaffer, has a great take on the link between making your bed and driving continuous testing. He was inspired by navy SEALS and the conclusion is that little things make a difference - if they are done consistently and thoroughly.

Three steps to continuous testing

In his blog post (which you can read here: http://bit.ly/2vG5LXn), Jeff also points out that in order to achieve continuous testing, you should do three things right:

1. Shift left which means incorporating testing into software design and development to find defects earlier while the current sprint is still underway
2. Shift right which incorporates user monitoring into DevOps initiatives to find performance and availability issues that might have tested well in the lab, but surfaced during production
3. Automation which is achieved through a mix of orchestration and analytics. Orchestrating the entire toolchain with agnostic pipeline planning and optimization, eliminates tedious tracking spreadsheets, and enables the automation of test processes. Analytics on time spent at each step in the SDLC provides a basis to continually improve the delivery of revenue-generating features to your customers.

Exploit automation as a business enabler

Despite the criticality of the latter, Automation, only one in five organisations use test automation as a business enabler. That is one of the conclusions in a global study that was published a couple of months ago. The study “Continuous Testing as a Digital Business Enabler” reveals that 80 percent of businesses are missing out on full benefits of continuous testing.

Julie at TestExpo in Denmark

Another colleague of mine, Julie Gardiner, is chairing a workshop on continuous adaptive testing at the TestExpo 2017 event, Mind the Gap, in Copenhagen 31st. August. Julie will be speaking at 13:20. Check out the program here: http://www.tilmeld.dk/testexpo2017/program.html