Continuous
Testing - What, Why it Matters & How it works ?

What is Continuous Testing?

Continuous Testing is an automated testing that is implemented with an objective to provide quality related feedback continuously, at every step of the software development life cycle (SDLC). Via continuous testing, after every change that is checked in by a developer - a set of automated tests are executed and feedback on the quality of the build is provided in terms of the test results.

As modern application development requires quick and quality releases, implementing continuous testing along with continuous integration ensures quality checks at every stage of development and avoids any unwanted bugs during the later stages of development.

Under this methodology, the testing team aims to achieve continuous quality and improvement by testing the software early and more often.

The idea is to remove all the bottlenecks by executing the right tests at the right stages of SDLC. Incorporating continuous testing in an organization is not easy but with the help of a proper strategy and tools, the QA team can ensure a smooth integration in the process.

Testing is of many types and is broadly dependent on the software product or application type being built. However, one aspect remains the same - testing often and testing better. While this can be done in many automated ways, testing applications through data has remained the most widely accepted choice.

The information throughout will help you seek knowledge on what we call Data-Driven Testing (DDT).

Why Continuous Testing?

Continuous testing is important in delivering quality software at a faster pace. This includes constant testing during the development lifecycle, which allows defects to be detected from an early stage. Thus, further reducing the cost of rectifying them later.

It also applies to agile development methodologies, which usually involve frequent releases. With test automation as one of its components, continuous testing can also save time and effort for development teams.

Importance of Continuous Testing

Continuous Testing has a significant impact in enhancing the scope of testing in software organizations.

With Continuous Testing, QA can test early, test more often, test faster and automate the testing process. Continuous Testing needs to be data driven which makes it faster, better, and cheaper.

It reduces a lot of effort put in by the developers and testers in deploying and monitoring QA programs.

Continuous Testing is a modern technique of testing which depends on actionable feedback at each stage of the software delivery cycle unlike the old techniques where the feedback system is irregular and test data management is not defined properly.

This benefit of Continuous Testing helps increase the development and deployment efficiency, without making any compromise on the quality, speed and costs.

As the consumer requirements and industry dynamics are changing continuously, companies demand from testing and hence this demand can be easily fulfilled with the integration of Continuous Testing in the QA process.

The 3 Fundamentals of Continuous Testing

• People : Each person in a team has a unique responsibility in the delivery pipeline for which he/she must possess the required skills. Transparent and regular communication between the members is the key to success.
• Process : Process remains the key in Continuous Testing. Instead of automating everything, focus should be on test automation, code quality, stability, efficiency and providing timely feedback to the developers.
• Technology :Technology should be leveraged to get a stable testing environment and build proper alignment between the team’s skills and software tools.

Read here - Continuous testing tools.

Benefits of Continuous testing

Here are some of the key benefits of Continuous Testing:

• Continuous Testing ensures that almost all the errors and issues are found before being released to production.

• Continuous Testing’s objective is to test early and test often throughout the development, delivery, testing and deployment cycles.

• Continuous Testing helps achieve continuous quality and improvement.

• Continuous Testing can easily and smoothly be integrated into DevOps processes.

• There are many tools available in the market which supports Continuous Testing which makes the testing process faster, easier, and more reliable.

• Continuous Testing helps in bringing complete transparency between different departments in an organization by eliminating gaps between the development, testing and operational teams.

• Continuous Testing fasten up the process from delivery to production and helps get faster software releases.

• Continuous Testing identifies and fixes potential business risks by a significant margin before they actually become big issues.

• Continuous Testing helps gain customer loyalty by accomplishing continuous quality and improvement.

Continuous Testing Methodologies

Continuous Testing methodologies aim to provide rapid feedback on the quality of the software being developed, enabling teams to detect and fix issues quickly.

Here are some key methodologies and practices associated with Continuous Testing:

Enhancing Quality Throughout the Lifecycle:

• Shift-Left Testing: This strategy prioritizes early testing, integrating tests into the development process. This helps catch bugs and issues early on, minimizing costly fixes later.

Early Detection of Issues:

• Smoke Testing: These quick and basic tests verify core functionalities work as expected. They are ideal for early builds to identify major flaws before further development.

Focused Testing for Specific Areas:

• Unit Testing: These tests isolate and test individual software units (functions, classes) to ensure they perform as designed. They help catch logic errors early in development.
• Performance Testing: This assesses an application′s ability to handle expected load and user traffic. It helps identify bottlenecks and ensures the system performs well under pressure.

Ensuring System Functionality:

• Integration Testing: This verifies different software modules interact seamlessly and function as a cohesive whole. It identifies issues arising from communication between modules.
• Functional Testing: This ensures the software behaves as per its specifications and user requirements. It focuses on verifying core functionalities to deliver the intended value.

Verifying User Experience:

• Usability Testing: This evaluates how easy and intuitive the user interface is for target users. It helps identify areas for improvement in user interaction and navigation.

Maintaining Stability:

• Regression Testing: This ensures bug fixes or code changes haven′t introduced unintended regressions (i.e., new issues). It involves re-running existing tests after modifications.

Real-World Validation:

• User Acceptance Testing (UAT): Real users or a representative group evaluate the software in a simulated real-world environment. This helps identify usability issues and ensures the application meets user expectations.

Continuous Integration and Automation:

Continuous testing methodologies often leverage continuous integration (CI) practices. CI automates the building, testing, and deployment pipeline, enabling frequent testing and feedback loops. Additionally, many tests within this spectrum can be automated using testing frameworks, further streamlining the process.

By strategically applying these methodologies throughout the SDLC, development teams can deliver high-quality software that meets user needs and performs well in production.

Continuous Testing & Testing Automation

Continuous Testing is considered as highly valuable by the organizations as it helps in timely detection and fixing of bugs and critical issues but it can’t be achieved without automation.

Automating helps in finding bugs as early as possible as it tests every time the code is integrated. Automated continuous testing can help an organization save time, effort and money.

With Automated continuous testing, software organizations can meet the changing customer demands easily.

If organizations plan to move towards efficient continuous delivery from continuous integration then investing in a good automation tool is a must. Automating test scenarios helps save time, money and achieve increased agility and ability to respond.

Get here - Continuous testing platform

How to do Continuous Testing?

Continuous Testing should be used at every stage of the Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery pipeline by setting up an automated test suite. This test suite should automate all important test cases and should be executed whenever there are any changes, merges or releases in the code. This helps in reducing the time and effort on testing by running tests at a specific point rather than running every test at once.

Continuous Delivery can’t be done without using Continuous Testing. It gives best results when the most recent build is used in an isolated environment. Use containerization to replicate code outside the main code repository and make your continuous testing faster by using the best tools. Eliminate blocks and reduce wait times by providing complete test environments as test environments are critical in achieving Continuous Testing.

Read here - continuous testing strategy

Why You Need to Test Continuously

Continuous Testing can help businesses create high value via high integration level and automation of testing and deployment. By adopting the next generation Continuous Testing and test automation, the delivery teams can accelerate their releases along with maintaining high quality.

Here are some reasons why you need to test continuously:

• With Continuous Testing and test automation , organizations can efficiently respond to the market changes as updates are developed faster and released more frequently.
• Deploying Continuous Testing in the software development cycle makes sure that the development team gets faster feedback at each development stage which helps in getting faster releases with fewer defects.
• Continuous Testing identifies and assesses all the potential errors very early at the initial development stage before the integration which helps in improving test coverage.
• Continuous Testing plays an important role in giving error-free outputs by identifying and eliminating those errors early in the development cycle. This helps in reducing the overall costs of fixing the errors.
• Continuous Testing can easily be integrated with the existing Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery pipeline without the need of any new tool.

With Continuous Testing, organizations can make their software delivery more agile with high quality and fast releases.

Steps to Perform Continuous Testing:

• Create the test environment
• Perform parallel performance testing

Challenges of continuous testing

While Continuous Testing has a lot of benefits for the organizations opting it, there are certain challenges faced by the QA teams while using Continuous Testing which must be taken into consideration:

• The development and testing teams have to undergo cultural shifts in case traditional processes are being maintained.

• Those developers who don’t generally get into the process of integrating their code on a regular basis may create defect issues with non-compatible code and duplicated coding efforts.

• Lack of test environments is one of the biggest challenges with Continuous Testing. QA teams need to ensure that the test environments work within the code repository base to get a seamless testing for the latest available code.

• To implement Continuous Testing, strong discipline is required among the test automation teams throughout the software development cycle to ensure smooth flow of processes.

• The challenge to overcome with the low testing throughput and bulk of unexecuted tests in the pipeline due to lack of proper tools to automate the process.

Continuous Testing Best Practices

Though Continuous Testing has become a standard practice now, organizations face some unique challenges while accomplishing Continuous Testing.

Here are some steps to consider for successfully implementing Continuous Testing:

• Clearly define test cases and create test scripts early to enable Continuous Testing at all the stages of production and avoid wastage of time due to lack of clear requirements.

• Save time, money and resources by optimizing the testing processes and test coverage. Test only what you need to test and avoid unnecessary testing to maximize coverage.

• Shift-left your testing, i.e. perform testing earlier in the software development lifecycle with the help of test automation. Then shift-right your testing, i,e, continue to test through and after production along with continuous monitoring.

• Provide complete test environments to eliminate unnecessary blocks and reduce wait times.

• Get robust test data with real-world characteristics to avoid delays in software releases.

How to Perform Automated Continuous Testing in Testigma?

Testsigma is a powerful AI-driven automation testing platform that simplifies continuous testing. First, create an account or log in to Testsigma.

Here′s a step-by-step guide:

To perform automated continuous testing in Testigma, follow these steps:

Set Up Your Project:

• Create a Project: Log in to Testigma and create a new project or select an existing one.
• Define Test Plans: Set up test plans that outline the scope and objectives of your testing.

Integrate with CI/CD Tools:

• Connect CI/CD Tools: Integrate Testigma with your CI/CD pipeline (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab CI, CircleCI) to enable automated test execution. Follow Testigma’s integration guides to connect your preferred tools.

Create Automated Test Cases:

• Define Test Cases: Create automated test cases using Testigma’s NLPs (simple English- as shown in the example image below)

Configure Test Execution:

• Test Triggers: Set Up Configure triggers for automated test execution based on code commits, builds, or other events in your CI/CD pipeline.
• Schedule Tests: Set Up Set up schedules for regular test runs if needed.

Run Tests and Monitor Results:

• Execute Tests: Trigger test runs as part of your CI/CD process. Tests will execute automatically based on your configuration.
• Monitor Results: View and analyze test results in Testigma’s dashboard. Check for any failed tests and review detailed reports.

Review and Iterate:

• Analyze Feedback: Use insights from test results to identify and address issues in your code.
• Update Tests: Modify or add test cases as your application evolves to ensure thorough coverage.

Keys to a Continuous Testing Framework

The foundation of a Continuous Testing Framework comprises certain key elements which work together to make a strong strategy and get a fully optimized testing process.

• Make a cultural commitment in the team towards collaboration and quality for effective Continuous Testing. Both the developers and testers should have a mutual understanding of the basic quality and efficiency levels to maintain throughout the development process.
• Apply a broad range of tests throughout the testing process which includes unit testing, integrated testing, regression testing and production testing.
• Scale your test environment to run tests in parallel. Make use of a cloud-based, cross-browser testing platform to reduce test times as much as possible.
• Integrate analytics within the testing process which can generate right insights, throw light on the key functional issues and to check the consistency of the test results. A layer of analytic insights gives the developers a better understanding of the entire quality picture and initiates the required improvements in time.

Continuous Testing, Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery & DevOps

Continuous Testing is a methodology which aims to continuous quality and improvement in the software development life cycle to mitigate the business risks.

Continuous Integration (CI) is a practice which aims to simplify the process of a software release. It focuses on checking whether the main application is working properly after the new commits are integrated into the main application.

Continuous Delivery (CD) on the other hand can be considered as an extension to the Continuous Integration as it focuses on making the new changes reach customers quickly and in a sustainable way. Continuous Delivery gives an option to automate the software release process and deploy the software at any frequency, be it daily, weekly, monthly or as per the business requirement, with just a click.

Overall, DDT revolves around how efficiently an Continuous Delivery and DevOps are two related yet distinct methodologies. They share common traits with a common goal to reach the market faster for new releases. However, the goal of DevOps is to merge the roles of a developer with an Operational guy in order to achieve common goals whereas Continuous Delivery works to ensure that any version of an application can be released with just a click.

Read here - Continuous testing in Devops

Conclusion

Let’s go back over what we’ve discussed:

Continuous testing is, in modern software development, one of the most important practices that enable the delivery of high-quality products efficiently. Benefits of Continuous Testing include Early detection of defects, improved product quality, faster time-to-market, reduced risk and increased customer satisfaction

Testsigma is an advanced AI-driven test automation tool that makes continuous testing work easy. Key Features of Testsigma include ‘test case design in plain English’, ‘seamless integration with CI/CD pipelines’, ‘parallel test execution’, ‘detailed reports’, and ‘self-healing’.

If you have further questions about Testsigma or continuous testing, in general, do not hesitate to connect.