With Enterprises increasingly leaning towards agile methodologies and DevOps integration, a smart testing strategy has become critical. The businesses are transforming digitally; they need a robust and full-proof test strategy that will ensure optimal efficiency and decrease software failures. Companies no longer have the luxury of time that they used to have with traditional SDLC. In such scenarios, Continuous Testing emerges as the only answer.
Continuous Testing mainly refers to unobstructed testing at each phase of a software development life cycle. The comprehensive study from Forrester and DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) shows that continuous testing is significant for the success of DevOps and other digital transformation proposals and initiatives. However, adoption levels of Continuous testing adoption are low, even though test teams had already started practicing DevOps. Those selective enterprises have already attained remarkable results to accelerate innovation while reducing business risks and improving cost efficiency.
Why Continuous Testing Strategy?
We mainly consider DevOps as a philosophy and process that guides software testers, developers, and IT operations to produce more software releases at higher speeds and with better outcomes. On the other side, continuous delivery is the methodology that invokes DevOps principles.
Continuous Delivery is about automating tasks to reduce manual efforts in the process of constantly integrating software. This paces up to push the tested software into production. Expert QA teams can make improvements along the way derived from continuous automated feedback about what truly works, and what is required to be done better.
The shift to experimentation is an essential part of making an agile landscape for digital transformation. The IT Companies can easily launch the perfectly working software, by adding additional functionality to existing systems and then work on improving and correcting the highly prioritized list of glitches. Even dealing with the critical issues in the shortest time with the tight feedback loops.
The continuous delivery model also gives IT companies the agility and production readiness it requires to promptly respond to market changes. It makes your end products more stable, your teams more productive, and speeds up your flexibility to facilitate fast and continuous innovation everywhere. Additionally, you can drive faster growth, help the business expand into new areas, and compete in the digital age with the improved responsiveness that this model reflects.
Four Sub-dimensions of Continuous Deployment
Using SAFe for Continuous Delivery:
- Deploy to production-Covers the skills required to deploy a solution to a production environment
- Verify the solution - Encompasses the skills required to confirm the changes operate in production as planned before they are released to customers
- Monitor for problems- Covers the skills to check and report on solutions
- Respond and recover- Includes the skills to rapidly tackle any issues that happen during deployment
Agile and DevOps Digital Transformation- The Three Ways
With the sprawling foothold of Agile and DevOps, backed by continuous testing, companies can follow ‘The Three Ways’ explained in The Phoenix Project to optimize business processes and increase profitability. These ways stand true for both the businesses and IT processes.
The 3 ways guiding the ‘Agile and DevOps’ digital transformation are:
- Work should flow in one direction- downstream
- Create, shorten, and amplify feedback loops
- Continuous experimentation, to learn from mistakes and attain mastery
These three ways help impart direct client value by integrating the best quality in products while managing efficiency and speed.
DevOps is Key to enable Continuous Delivery
Continuous delivery perfectly suits companies that are well-equipped with a collaborative DevOps culture. In a continuous paradigm, you can’t afford silos and handoffs between operation and development teams. If an organization does not embrace a DevOps-based culture, it will face complexity in building IT and development environments that are needed to compete in the digital era.
It is a concern when professionals need to focus on relentless improvement in technology. In different cases, it calls for an important shift in mindset. For example, to achieve the continuous delivery objective is to speed up releases and improve software quality, and for that we need to make a smooth shift-left of a series of activities like security and continuous testing. This causes cross-functional and proactive communication at each level of the organizations to bridge the gap that has traditionally existed among the businesses.
Instituting such the culture will also encourage autonomous teams. Development and operations teams need to get empowered to make their own decisions, without having to undergo complicated decision-making processes.
Industry Insights
Digital transformation, Agile, and DevOps will continuously thrive, and become the norm. It is time that companies should start taking it seriously to transform digitally. Irrespective of the tools and methodologies used, digital transformation efforts will fail without a continuous testing strategy.
Digital transformation, Agile, and DevOps are together building a future where innovation is at the heart of all the processes. But this picture needs continuous testing to become complete. Integrating Continuous Testing with the existing system will enable organizations to proactively respond to glitches and instigate stability in their products.
ImpactQA experts with years of experience in Continuous Integration can configure and execute the most popular tools like Jenkins, Bamboo, Microsoft TFS and more.
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