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CI/CD Pipeline: Demystifying The Complexities

Industry leaders consider CI/CD to be an essential part of the app development cycle as enterprises are keen to reduce the time to market. Continuous integration and continuous delivery help in improving and enhancing the quality of the product while reducing the cost of the project. This blog will help you understand the functioning of a CI/CD pipeline, its challenges, and its benefits. Before we get into the details, let’s have a look at the basic terminology.

Continuous Integration

Continuous integration (CI) is a software development practice where developers frequently make changes in the code and add it to the central repository after which automated tests are run. CI is the integration stage of the software release process which depends on automation and constant integration. The main goal is to find the bugs and resolve the issue quickly to improve the software quality and reduce the time to market.

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Shift Left, Shift Right — What Are We Shifting, and Why?

As more teams embrace the challenges of continuous delivery, we hear lots of people talking about "shift left" and "shift right" in a testing context. What does that mean, exactly, and why does everyone want to do it?

When Software Development Was Linear

I joined my first "waterfall" process project back in the mid-1980s, as a developer. It was a linear progression, and in my head, I saw it unfurl from left to right. It seemed reasonable (to my naive eyes) to start with a thorough analysis of the system to be built, finding out what the customers wanted. This "phase" produced an analysis document which triggered the "requirements phase," during which analysts and product managers created a document detailing every bit of functionality to be built. And on it went, handoffs from one phase, and often one team, to the next, with thick Word documents changing hands, until the developers finally "froze" the code so that no more changes could be done. Finally, QA could start the testing phase, usually with very little time left until the release deadline!

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How To Implement Continuous Testing In DevOps Like A Pro

In a decade, the need for software development has evolved drastically. The software has become a key differentiator for companies to gain a competitive edge, especially if your company falls under the SaaS umbrella. From the implementation of traditional processes such as a waterfall in their SDLC, organizations are now transitioning towards Agile in order to deliver software at a faster pace in the market. To cope up with RAD (Rapid Application Development), we have witnessed numerous new approaches such as CI/CD, DevOps, and Shift Left testing to build, develop and optimize software delivery. Even so, trying to maintain both quality and speed is a real challenge, and testing methodologies can either aid or downshift this whole acceleration process. Today, we are going to look into the importance of Continous Testing in DevOps. In this article, I will be talking about what continuous testing is all about. I will also help clear the fog around the myths associated with continuous testing. We will also be touching the challenges involved in continuous testing in DevOps, and best practices to help you execute the continuous testing process as a professional. 

What Is Continuous Testing?

Continuous testing is an end-to-end quality maintenance process in which teams carry out a broad range of automated tests on an ongoing basis. Simultaneously, analyzing various business risks associated with the latest software development and providing the developers with quick feedback. This feedback helps to identify defects and errors at a very early stage and encourages developers to optimize their code during successive stages of the SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle).