This article was originally published on DevOps.com
It wasn’t long ago that the Dev and test teams would work late hours, focused and rushed to meet a deadline: rapid fixing, reprioritizing and deferring bugs to close out the bug list, move everything to the staging server, do one last run of the regression and pass it over to Ops/IT to move to production. What happened after? No one knew. For most Dev and test team members, Ops is a black box. More often than not, they are oblivious to what happens at Ops, the roles, responsibilities and timelines. One day—long after the drop-dead deadline for Dev and test teams—after delays, questions and changes, the product went live.
Does this scenario sound familiar? Well, DevOps is supposed to be a game changer.
DevOps means many things to many people. But for test teams, continuous testing (CT) is the primary task in DevOps. And, CT is not merely rerunning the same set of “full regression” tests over and over, as product gets delivered and deployed. This is actually a recipe for disaster and not the intent of continuous testing.
Recently, test teams were challenged to ramp up their practices by moving to agile and scrum. DevOps will propel the teams to now ramp their practices up even more—more automation, more technical testing and more tools to leverage. If your test team already has mature agile practices, with continuous testing, they can mature further to eventually accelerate the product release.
Continuous testing grows from continuous integration (CI). And The Success of CT is in its ability to get everyone involved and not just the test team.
Continuous testing is a lean process of quality at every step. It includes quality user stories, quality environments, quality unit tests and quality performance tests. It is “testing at every step” and not “QA” at the end. It is also shifting testing tasks from Ops at the end, by testing earlier and testing all along the way. CT is adding more tasks as well.
Everyone in the enterprise benefits by bringing Ops/IT and its processes into the dev process much earlier, by shifting left, and taking advantage of the advances in virtualization and infrastructure automation.
Read the full article to learn how to leverage Continuous Testing.
Michael is a Certified Scrum Master and has co-authored two books on software testing. Testing Applications on the Web: Test Planning for Mobile and Internet-Based Systems (Wiley, 2nd ed. 2003), available in English, Chinese and Japanese, and Global Software Test Automation (HappyAbout Publishing, 2006). He is a founding member of the Board of Advisors at the University of California Berkeley Extension and has taught for the Certificate in Software Quality Engineering and Management at the University of California Santa Cruz Extension. As a member of IEEE, his training courses have brought Silicon Valley testing expertise to over 16 countries."