6 Effective Practices to Implement Continuous Testing
Continuous testing is crucial in a modern development environment as it helps bring testing up to speed with the pace of Agile development. However, it’s not an easy task to successfully implement continuous testing. In this article, we will walk you through the 6 must-know continuous testing practices to help you effectively build a continuous testing strategy.
6 Best Practices to Implement Continuous Testing
1. Integrate performance testing into delivery cycle
Performance testing is an integral part of continuous testing as it checks the speed, responsiveness, and stability of your application. It’s an investigative process that observes how the system is running and find solutions to overcome those observations. After all, if the application is not reliable or the data is not accurate, would you continue to have a great ROI?
If you want to keep up the speed, maintain low effort to script, and create parallel executions with minimal interdependence, you should use tools to help you with these efforts! One of the best tools that can help with your performance testing is Neoload which works well with a continuous testing strategy.
2. Save time with headless execution
Headless execution is the part of automating user interface tests that don’t incorporate the head (i.e. no browser UI or GUI). Resulting in faster execution, this process reduces the number of unnecessary caches, cookies, or resources that are sifted through to obtain the results that matter: does the application run as expected. Be sure to run a subset of your tests on a real browser before releasing to your customers.
3. Multi-layer tests
Using a multi-layered approach to run tests ensures all areas within the development lifecycle are covered. From unit, integration (API), system (GUI), and database testing, complete automation must take multiple testing processes into consideration for thorough testing to be carried out. As software techniques become more complex (especially taking into consideration the next steps of microservices), having a multi-layer approach in place will help you keep the complexity from overwhelming proper test execution.
4. Tracking Metrics
Use quantifiable metrics to keep track of your success or failure rate during testing. Two key metrics that you need to be sure to keep track of are: counts of defects and counts of fail/pass test scripts. Tracking the number of defects discovered in your testing process will help you determine if the number increases or decreases. Additionally, keeping track of the number of pass/fail test scripts will help you produce a comprehensive testing strategy to create better functionality for your application.
Continuous testing offers immediate results to see if the software is working as expected. Hard data yield results to measure progress and quality outputs. Tracking how many bugs are found and corrected provides continuous validation for your business value ROI.
5. Adopt More Test Automation
Automation helps increase the speed and errors coverage at which testing can function. Automating as much as you can in the development lifecycle will help you achieve faster releases.
6. Leverage containerization
Containerization makes continuous testing easier to process by keeping each service of the application in its own environment. Also, using containers for your test environments keeps the often difficult-to-maintain environments up-to-date with the latest code changes that would be released to production. Furthermore, if the test suite fails or if the data ends up corrupted, the container can be discarded and another one set up with fresh data. Read more
Conclusion:
After all, continuous testing is all about testing early and often, which can be challenging to implement. Above are 6 best practices that you should consider to help you make the best decision for your software testing needs. Make sure you have a solid plan in place before incorporating this testing procedure into your organization.