The purpose of DevOps is to speed up software deliveries by reducing time while maintaining extraordinary performance. It also faces a serious challenge in assuring software quality. Speaking of which, DevOps testing approaches might be able to deliver end-to-end software value streams but at the cost of getting 50% of bottlenecks. This article contains eight effective measures of continuous testing practices explaining the implementation approach for greater adoption of CT with strategies to reduce bottlenecks in organizational IT processes.

8 Pillars of Continuous Testing:

CT Tenets:

To enable continuous testing, DevOps developers need to follow these five tenets or guiding principles:

1. Try to conduct each test in the pipeline as early as possible.

2. Cover or arrange necessary tests with the development phase to find issues early in the DevOps pipeline.

3. Try all combination and permutation conditions to run tests frequently.

4. Streamline the tests to run in quick loops.

5. Apart from trying different conditions, focus more on the important tests and their results.

Leadership and Environment:

The quality of leadership and environment majorly influences the factors involved in testing activities across the DevOps value stream. The lack of coordination, goals, and vision among Developers, QAs and Operations teams, might generate bottlenecks to continuous testing activities. To mitigate that, the executive team needs to clear the quality definition and make organizational teams realize its importance. A collaborative environment is possible to achieve between executive team members via communicating the goals and visions for generating quality and incentives.

Testing Plans and Strategies:

For each product and service pipeline, well-planned test strategies are needed to direct testing approaches. If the strategies are weakly planned, it might result in bottlenecks in resource generation processes and thus create troubles in continuous testing processes. It is important to design planning test strategies with test coverage standards, gate criteria, and test case standards, as well as testing requirements with testing backlogs and sprints to avoid bottlenecks. Read Also: The Necessity of Integrated Enterprise DevOps Platforms to Avoid System Bottlenecks

Test Management:

Test management is necessary when it comes to managing test schedules and test resources altogether. Poorly utilized test resources are a sign of a lack of visibility and coordination of test schedules, which can lead to testing bottlenecks. Hence, it is important to have a well-managed test database, including test scheduling tools and resources. Continuous testing strategies must include tests and resources' version management and an inventory of dynamic test scheduling and test resources.

Test Automation:

While planning primary test strategies, it is important to check their alignment with all types of tests, from designing to execution in an automated manner. Bottlenecks in continuous testing can slow down the test creation and execution and majorly slow the getting time of verdicts. Effective continuous testing strategies must include advanced test design templates, tools, dynamic test selection, and tests designed with vertical and horizontal scaling tests for faster verdicts.

Test Tools:

Test tools are integrated with DevOps platforms through APIs to automate dynamic tests with testing configurations, execution, and logging. Some test tools contain limited test configuration and may contain incomplete APIs that can generate bottlenecks to continuous testing, and inefficiency to DevOps platforms integration and are error-prone. Thus, continuous testing strategies should allow selecting only those test tools that have stable and well-defined APIs to integrate with DevOps platforms.

Test Environment Management:

The effective management of scheduling and setting up resources into the required processes for running various tests for DevOps developers and testers is important, or else it will result in bottlenecks to test environments. Bottlenecks to continuous testing can result in ineffective test resource scheduling, which can be a problem for manual test setups, and resources, and it for sure consumes more time in providing verdicts. A perfect continuous testing strategy must include the well-utilization of test environment inventory tools, sharing tools, orchestration tools, and monitoring test environment tools. Read Also: 5 DevOps Dimensions to Consider While Doing the Assessment of DevOps Capabilities (ADOC)

Test Results Analysis:

After the test is executed completely, the process of reporting and analyzing test results can be about bottlenecks. This congestion results in poorly written tests that might generate confusing results and take a longer time for the analysis. In order to get precise test results, it is necessary to have a test chart of result reporting standards. Effective continuous testing strategies must include test analysis tools and reporting tools with test verdict design in test cases.

Wrapping Up:

Typically, testing activities are the main sources of congestion and perhaps raise the obligation for quality at speed. The motive of continuous testing strategies is to speed up all aspects of testing, which ultimately leads to faster software delivery without compromising quality. Therefore, these strategies' implementation starts by applying to some selected applications and then extends to more applications. Build an effective DevOps solution for your organization with the help of the best DevOps engineers’ teams in India. Contact us NOW!!!