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Traditional approaches to enterprise IT – typically reliant on time-consuming, manual processes – have been overtaken in recent years by more agile, efficient, outcome-orientated models.
And with that shift putting an emphasis on faster cycles of development for software products, DevOps and Agile methodologies are now essential for any business looking to succeed with a meaningful digital transformation initiative.
The slow speed of feedback to the dev team through the results of manual tests decreases productivity significantly. Re-executing manual tests in every iteration of SDLC is not a sustainable pattern in current world. There is never enough time, and adding more personnel to execute manual regression tests leads to reduced returns. Test effectiveness is a critical aspect to keep up with the faster-paced development life cycles so that sufficient quality of the system can be ensured and time and money can be saved. To have better test effectiveness, we need to think differently with the increasing adoption of agile and DevOps practices. We need to have automations in all layers of the test pyramid. This includes unit tests, component tests/service tests, and UI tests.
The number of new features, and therefore the number of tests, increases significantly after a few iterations in almost all agile teams. The only way to keep up with the needed regression testing is to automate the right set of tests to ensure the change hasn’t impacted existing functionality. Realistically, we can’t test everything, and we can’t automate all our tests. So, we need to find the right balance. To accomplish this balance, mature DevOps teams use a combination of test automation and manual exploratory testing, both running in a continuous pattern.
When the historians of the future get around the commerce of our times, they are sure to garner overwhelming evidence around the appeal for artificial intelligence and machine learning. The way these two technologies have dug their heels into every possible sector in today’s global market is a revolution in itself. For IT and digitalization industries, in particular, the phrases “DevOps” and “continuous testing” are now finding themselves inseparable from the conversations around AI- and ML-based automation strategies. If anything, it already seems a bit late to expand that conversation to accommodate QA automation.
As new technology is introduced, companies, though reasonably skeptical, are beginning to explore and adapt them against the unique demands of consumers. By implementing safe and efficient automated programs for quality assurance, they are already ensuring minimal downtime and uncompromised service experience for their customers. Continuous testing has become synonymous with the QA strategies in most of the DevOps pipelines. Therefore, it only makes sense to bridge the benefits of continuous testing with the potential enrichments of AI-driven automation. Through the course of this article, we will discuss the various aspects of this bridge, including its relevance, necessity, and aftermath for the world that is already going through its fourth industrial revolution.
The retail industry has been actively adopting digital transformation in order to provide a better user experience. According to current trends, the reliance on digital channels has been enormous, placing them at the core of all significant online retail operations.
Mobile sales increased by 68 percent in 2020 and are anticipated to surpass other channels as the largest source of all sales by the end of this year. Can you identify the true reason for increased sales using retail mobile applications? The answer is "digital confidence."
Digital transformation has gripped us all! Most of the businesses are moving towards a cloud-centric environment and leaning towards ‘Shift-left’ DevOps practices. This rapid paradigm shift in Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is creating a need to integrate continuous testing to build out resilient CI/CD pipelines. Balancing quality and speed is a major challenge and continuous testing in CI/CD can act as a catalyst in the whole process.
To ace the competition, businesses are looking for better ways to perform CI/CD Pipeline Automation Testing. One of the approaches adopted by many is an integration of continuous testing in the entire product development life cycle, right from the start until the end.
As companies develop, they provide services at greater capacities. To achieve new heights, a company needs to improve the quality of the platform behind its success. Several software tests can improve your digital products. Software scalability tests are imperative for any company operating in the digital market.
Scalability testing and performance testing are ways to assess software capabilities. Performance testing focuses on response times and software quality. Scalability testing targets the software’s performance when adding new resources. Continuous testing plays a different role in the development process.
In the last few decades, the internet has seen tremendous growth; internet users are increasing each day, which has increased the demand for websites. Every stunning website has the support of rigorous testing behind it. But, testing different web applications is not as easy as it may sound. Things that work perfectly fine in one browser might not be fit for the other. It becomes quite challenging for the teams to keep up with this issue. Hence, investing in cross-browser compatibility testing becomes a necessity. Cross-browser testing has so far been quite an ordeal for all the front-end developers and testers on earth. The underlying cause of the problem certainly is the browser fragmentation issue, and to resolve it cross-browser compatibility testing seems like the only possible solution.
In simple terms, Cross-browser Compatibility mainly focuses on ensuring that the basic features of your website are compatible with different operating systems, devices, browsers, and browser-OS combinations. There are many browsers in the market, but the popular ones like Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari, and UC browser, capture the maximum market share. Compatibility is an ever-prevailing issue in the software world. Cross-browser testing plays a critical role in easing the situation; however, it is not an end to the problem. Testing compatibility ensures that your websites and web apps work well on the maximum number of web browsers.
With time progressing, technology is transforming at a lightning speed to make the software development process much simpler, faster, qualitative, and convenient. Technologies like machine learning and AI are being utilized in several ways, not only to process qualitative and faster data but also to process predictive data. Having said that, the software development lifecycle has also evolved extensively since the last decade. Although agile is the go-to development process used by most of the development team, but since the introduction of DevOps, teams are either opting for Agile+DevOps or even implementing only the DevOps methodology.
The basic difference between Agile and DevOps is that Agile refers to an iterative approach that focuses on collaboration, customer feedback, and rapid releases while DevOps brings the development and the operations team together to manage the end-to-end engineering process. DevOps, especially in the area of testing products, brought a paradigm shift!
Since its inception, Quarkus has focused on more than just delivering sets of features. Developer productivity and joy have been critical components of Quarkus. The developer experience and how to improve it are carefully considered with every new feature added. This article showcases the maturity and evolution of developer productivity capabilities within Quarkus from inception to the newly-released version 2.0.
Quarkus rests on a vast ecosystem of technologies, standards, libraries, and APIs, making Quarkus “familiar” but “new”. Developers don’t have to spend lots of time learning an entirely new set of APIs and technologies to take advantage of the benefits Quarkus brings to the JVM or native images. Instead, developers can utilize their existing knowledge and skills. Among the specifications and technologies underlying Quarkus are Eclipse MicroProfile, Eclipse Vert.x, Contexts & Dependency Injection (CDI), JAX-RS, the Java Persistence API (JPA), the Java Transaction API (JTA), Apache Camel, and Hibernate, just to name a few.
We all understand the importance of software testing and how it transforms a business by enabling the delivery of quality products to clients in shorter delivery cycles. It's impossible to run test cases manually by evaluating the quality of each line of code at every step of the Continuous Delivery process. This is where Continuous testing in DevOps comes into the picture.
In traditional ways of testing, software was passed through different development and QA phases which took more time until the final delivery of the product. According to research by Gartner, Continuous Testing in DevOps is aimed at providing early and quick detection of signs of risks related to the product release. DevOps Continuous Testing is an inevitable part, rather than just a stage, of the delivery process. The main purpose is to inculcate quality into the CI/CD pipeline by utilizing the key benefits of continuous testing in DevOps.
Continuous Testing is a critical aspect of DevOps, responsible for seamless Continuous Delivery. It involves the usage of agile development methods and processes in the QA process, which provides a more productive testing process.
Automation in the testing domain has evolved a lot when it comes to Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning specifically. Self-driven cars, bots, and the famous Amazon-owned product, Alexa are some of the basic examples of how AL and ML have influenced our lives and day-to-day activities. With updated application software and devices making users' lives easier than ever, emphasis on the demand for product quality for users has increased. Customers are becoming intolerant to product defects with the number of alternatives available to them to switch in the market. The statistics mentioned below are true when talking about the loyalty a customer can portray for a particular product or service for a company.
"91% of non-complainers just leave and 13% of them tell 15 more people about their bad experience for a product."
We live in an age where more than 5 lakh websites are created daily. As of today, there are nearly 4 million websites in the world out of which only 1.5 million are active. What about the rest?
As per records, 90% of the web applications fail to work because of browser compatibility issues and 62% of mobile application uninstalls happen due to mobile crashes like poor responsiveness and alignment issues indirectly aiming at improper cross-browser testing.
DevOps, CI/CD, and Agile are all methodologies and approaches that have gained attention in recent years in the QA and testing fields.
They have emerged with the need to make testing leaner and to enable businesses to deliver quality at speed.
Does your development team feel stuck when it comes to knowing what specific things to focus on to improve your software testing and quality management? Need to figure out how to fill in the gaps and improve efficiency and results?
In this post, I’ll share the process behind this software testing maturity assessment my team and I devised at Abstracta so that you can bring some of these ideas to your test strategy, working towards continuous improvement.
In this competitive digital era, there has always been a constant demand for continuous digital improvement. Even if automation is a prominent keyword nowadays, a recent report says that only 30% of the organizations have adopted automation testing. Although the organizations invest a considerable amount of time and money in transforming their development processes, they fail to reap the benefits of the shift in the right direction by choosing only a few aspects of testing.
Change is inevitable in the software development lifecycle and to go hand in hand with the ever-changing dynamics and produce high-quality software, it is important to rely on implementing an effective Continuous testing Strategy. The development teams have to be focused on optimizing the delivery cycles and provide uninterrupted business experience.
“Automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”
– Bill Gates
Your customers are the true market makers. They continuously contribute to reshaping your industry and influencing the competitive environment.
Your success highly depends on your time-to-market and how well you respond to your customer's demands. Employing DevOps can enable you to speed up your product delivery and improve the overall customer experience — so you can stay ahead of your competition.
Continuous testing isn’t just about automation or CI/CD pipelines — it's synonymous to testing throughout the SDLC. It's about automating those tests and about implementing the right policies and procedures to ensure testing is performed whenever necessary, whether automated or manual.
Our upcoming report will explore continuous testing capabilities, challenges, and emerging approaches in 2020 and beyond. For individuals who have a role in testing at their organization, your insights will be a key part of our research.