By 2021, 74% of the organizations globally have already adopted DevOps. As more companies undergo digital transformation, you will see a rise in these numbers. DevOps enables smooth communication and collaboration among development and operation teams to shorten the development cycle and increase release frequency. However, to successfully implement DevOps into your ecosystem, you should know all its best practices and principles.
One of those fundamental principles is continuous testing, where you execute automated test cases as a part of the delivery life cycle to obtain real-time feedback about software quality. Unfortunately, only 55% of top-level firms have successfully implemented this principle, which shows it’s not easy as it sounds. So the question is, how can one optimize continuous testing to utilize DevOps to its fullest potential? OR what best practices one can follow for it?
For addressing this burning issue, I’ve decided to pen down my thoughts on this subject. This article will help you know the best practices that can help you optimize continuous testing in the DevOps life cycle. So, let’s get things moving now!
Best practices to optimize continuous testing
- Craft teams with a diverse skillset
You can assign the responsibility of continuous testing to a few QA experts and hope that they can get the job done in a quick time. However, cloud-driven interconnected apps and networking endpoints can succumb to failure. Maintaining a stable, resilient, and high-performance backend is critical for continuous delivery, and for that purpose, you will require teams with a diverse skillset.
DevOps' multidisciplinary teams can accelerate the testing process without compromising the continuity. Furthermore, these teams can rapidly respond to any type of failure during testing and analyze test results. Thus, start preparing such teams in advance.
- Create a feedback loop
As per a survey conducted by Capgemini, 40% of users measure the effectiveness of continuous testing via user feedback and adoption. Therefore, you should have a feedback loop from the beginning of the continuous testing process in the DevOps ecosystem. The feedback loop will connect every team member and ensure a real-time collaboration.
When you have seamless communication among the various teams, there’s every chance that you will be able to deliver a high-quality product to the client. Furthermore, introducing a real-time feedback mechanism system will allow creative ideas and problem-solving approaches to brainstorm.
- Utilize test automation suite
Test automation suite is the heart and soul of the continuous testing life cycle. It will enable you to perform automated checks on the developers. However, to utilize the true potential of the test automation suite, you need to select the right tools. Sometimes, you would only use the tool your team is familiar with.
Other times, people get trapped into choosing a widely popular tool. Both these approaches are wrong; you need to know the skill set of your developers and the allocated budget for testing. Then, based on that analysis, come up with suitable tools that fit your need. Here are some of the most commonly used tools for automation testing:
- JMeter: Performance and load testing
- Katalon Studio: Web, API, desktop, and mobile testing
- Soap UI: REST, SOAP, and GraphQL API testing
- Selenium: Web application testing
- Maintain a proper test documentation
Successful DevOps teams have maintained proper test documentation to make the continuous testing process transparent and organized. The testing documentation comprises Quality Management Plans (QMP), Test summary reports, Test case specifications, Risk assessment reports, Regression test reports, etc. You should create these documents before or after completing the testing phase in the DevOps lifecycle. One of the biggest USPs of these test documents is that they would serve as a reference for the trainees, and the organization doesn’t have to create the essential test documentation from scratch again, which saves a lot of costs.
- Try out headless browsers
Headless browsers allow you to run the test cases in the browser without using a UI (User Interface) or GUI (Graphical User Interface). So, you can use them for implementing continuous testing in the DevOps ecosystem, especially if you’re developing any web application.
Puppeteer, HTML Unit, Headless Chrome, etc., are some of the popular headless browsers you can utilize. Furthermore, headless browsers can also help you to scale up continuous testing. Lastly, it requires less RAM and processing power, and that’s why it can offer results quicker than a standard browser which is precisely what you want in a continuous testing scenario.
- Focus on designing optimal workflows
Designing optimal workflow is critical to the success of a DevOps lifecycle. However, the effectiveness would only last until you have the stable infrastructure to support a continuous DevOps cycle for constant testing.
For example, if your system is error-prone and gives false-negative results, you can’t implement continuous testing in that environment. To avoid this situation, focus on designing optimal continuous testing workflows that automate manual procedures and deliver faster results. So, you should focus on automation for successful enterprise DevOps transformation. Then, it would help you in a continuous testing scenario.
- Measure performance with metrics
Implementing continuous testing in the DevOps ecosystem is one thing by following all the best practices, but knowing whether your strategy worked or needs improvement is also essential. For that purpose, you can take assistance with various metrics. Some of the key metrics you can measure include the ratio of the pass to failed cases, the number of bugs detected, frequency of test case failure, etc.
By analyzing these metrics in detail, organizations can know the areas vulnerable to failures and where continuous testing can be the most effective. Lastly, these metrics will also help test automation engineers to write better test cases for the future.
Wrapping up
Implementing continuous testing is not only about following the best practices. If you want to successfully implement continuous testing for your DevOps ecosystem, try to streamline the collaboration among development and operation teams. If the teams work alongside each other, getting constant feedback and resolving the error in real-time becomes more manageable, which is the essence of continuous testing.
Continuous testing is an integral part of CI/CD pipelines that helps you deliver high-quality software rapidly. However, the success of this technique depends on the best practices that you follow. Here, I’ve covered some of these best practices in detail. I hope this will help you in optimizing continuous testing in DevOps implementation.