What does Continuous Testing mean and how to perform it?

What is Continuous Testing?

Continuous Testing is a software testing type in which the product is evaluated early, often, and throughout the entire Continuous Delivery (CD) process. Continuous testing uses automated tests to ensure teams receive immediate feedback to quickly mitigate as many risks as possible throughout the software development lifecycle. Moreover, team members are able to continuously learn about their product and what can be done to increase quality and reliability.

The goal of Continuous Testing is to test early and test often. The process involves stakeholders like Developer, DevOps, QA and Operational system.

Benefits of Continuous Testing

Let’s break down a few benefits of continuous testing!

Increase release rate: Speed up delivery to production and release faster

Accelerate testing: Run parallel performance tests to increase testing execution speed

‍Find errors: Ensure as many errors are found before being released to production ‍

Reduce business risks: Assess potential problems before they become an actual problem

Test early and often: Tested throughout the development, delivery, testing, and deployment cycles

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The Key Elements of a Successful Continuous Testing Process

To put into place a continuous testing process within your company, you’ll need at the very least the following four elements.

1. A Continuous Integration Tool

A basic continuous integration tool allows the team to integrate new code that has been deposited into a central repository to produce a new build of a software solution. Before depositing new code into the central repository, team members can work independently to develop a new feature or new functionalities without affecting the version used by other team members.

2. Environment Provisioning

Having to create a test environment every time a team member wants to test a feature adds unnecessary steps (update the application, update the database if necessary, restart the services, etc) that slow the development team down and end up wasting a ton of time over the course of an entire project.

A platform like Docker can make this process much smoother and much simpler. Creating images requires an initial investment, but in the long run, you’ll likely save time. The container-based provisioning step can also be managed through a continuous integration tool as well.

3. End-To-End Testing

Environment provisioning and a continuous integration tool allow team members to verify new changes faster and more efficiently. After that, end-to-end testing, which integrates test scenarios, test scripts and test automation tools into a single platform, ensures software quality by testing the application from beginning to end and generating detailed test results. Using these results, it’s very easy for developers to identify the source of an error or what caused software quality to regress, allowing developers to fix these issues quickly.

Moreover, test automation doesn’t leave room for human errors, which means test results are always reliable. Thanks to the power of end-to-end testing, teams can control the quality of the software solutions they produce much more easily.

4. Teamwork

The last key ingredient of a successful continuous testing process is very simple: teamwork! A continuous testing process seeks to integrate testers and quality assurance specialists directly into the development team, allowing them to work side-by-side with developers to elaborate test strategies together. In the end, the code that the team develops is much more solid, as the entire team is involved in the quality assurance process.

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