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The testing process is key to delivering quality software. But as the demand for faster delivery increases, it becomes harder for human teams to keep up. Luckily, test automation can help cover tasks.
And DevOps can further help position testing efforts within the software development cycle. But when dealing with larger software products that have constantly evolving functionality, test automation gets trickier.
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!
BizDevOps. DevSecOps. DevTestOps. DevXOps. DevEverythingOps…
Call it whatever you want – the bottom line is that if you hyperfocus on bringing Dev and Ops together, you’re going to overlook a lot of the key elements required to release valuable software faster. Does it delight users? Satisfy business goals? Minimize quality and security risks? And how do you achieve all that without stifling speed and frustrating the original “proprietors” of DevOps: Development and Operations?
UI testing has had an upswing in activity in the last few years. New and exciting tools have entered the market, bringing all sorts of innovative approaches to make it simple to do what has traditionally been a pretty complicated process.
Back in the day, we only had big-box solutions like the IBM Rational Suite or Mercury/HP/MicroFocus QTP/UFT. Now we're seeing a lot of people moving away from the "traditional" test automation tools towards open source alternatives, like Selenium, or new innovative AI-powered solutions or frameworks, like mabl, Selenic, or Functionize. This shift is causing lots of hype, but it is also rooted in addressing common complaints and challenges, that you need to make sure to address if you're adopting a new tool.
In traditional software development, testing professionals manually tested the developed software but the need to test redundant scenarios necessitated the use of testing tools that would allow them to execute the same tasks automatically.
The benefit of automated testing was a reduced time to test legacy test scenarios, while the downside was that test automation involved the use of scripts. Testers needed to either learn the supported languages for automation testing or hire new resources who knew to code.
Is there anything more frustrating than to be stuck waiting? Regardless of what you are waiting for, it’s not a good place to be. According to the 2018-2019 World Quality Report (WQR) published by Capgemini, “…the lack of test environments and data is the number-one challenge in applying testing to Agile development." That means a lot of waiting and a lot of frustration.
Businesses need applications, enhancements, and fixes to be deployed at a velocity never before seen. Once the domain of small, nimble start-ups, even the largest of the large IT shops are getting in on the DevOps act, all for the promise of speed-of-delivery. As more and more organizations implement DevOps and CI/CD processes in order to keep pace with business demands, these issues are becoming more acute.
We operate in a continuous delivery world in which a seamless customer experience is paramount. Regardless of whether you're a global Fortune 500 organization or a fast-growing startup, failing to deliver a digital experience that delights your users is a critical mistake you can't afford to make.
A chief challenge compounding today's continuous delivery expectation is the growing amount of testing that has to be carried out. In the not-too-distant past, companies controlled all of their software, available on a single platform to a similar type of user with one uniform release cycle. Today's landscape is vastly different, with websites and apps relying on a mix of modules and services under the control of various vendors, all with independent release cycles, in a heterogeneous platform environment with a wide range of user types.
A significant parameter of software growth and delivery is the interaction and association that takes place among operation experts and project management professionals.
And this can happen only with the help of DevOps. It is just not a software or tool; it’s an art that you can accept for consistent development. DevOps has the ability to align your operations professionals and developer experts, permitting them to work together in comfort.
Want further evidence that Continuous Testing has evolved from buzzword to business imperative? New Forrester research found that Continuous Testing, done properly, is a key differentiator between DevOps + Agile leaders and DevOps + Agile laggards. Here are the key findings and recommendations from that research project.
Firms that are more mature in Agile + DevOps do five key things differently:
Here are some of the most interesting, inspiring, and contentious software testing quotes that have crossed our path over the past year.
The testing mindset is ‘I’m going to figure out how to break this.’ This is great because it gets developers thinking: ‘I’m not going to let them break this’ — and the software is much stronger as a result.