'Continuous Testing: What it is, Why You Need it, and How to Do it' digitaltransformation digitaltransformationguide
Traditional approaches to enterprise IT have been overtaken in recent years by more agile, efficient, outcome-orientated models. DevOps and Agile methodologies are now essential for any business looking to succeed with a meaningful digital transformation initiative. In this article, we’ll explore what continuous testing really is, how it can help your business, and how you should approach it from a strategic point of view.
But many businesses are too focused on this speed and are consequently overlooking the importance of quality assurance, to their own detriment. Even for businesses who don’t make that mistake, maintaining the necessary levels of quality alongside the speed of continuous delivery is still proving a significant challenge.
Continuous testing will take care of that, while significantly reducing the time in which developers receive feedback on what they’ve delivered. This is achieved by leveraging tests activated in certain environments alongside development, in addition to the traditional tests carried out manually at various stages.
So, for example, you wouldn’t have to wait until your functional testing was complete to then move on to performance testing, thus accelerating the time to delivery.If your business is practising – or even looking to practice – some kind of continuous delivery approach, while maintaining the highest possible levels of quality, continuous testing will be necessary.
This is especially relevant to large enterprises with large user bases. If testing and QA are not effectively embedded into the process of development and the pipeline of continuous delivery, the risk can become substantial, because the failure of an application once it’s been deployed can have a catastrophic impact on your business.When you are able to successfully execute a strategy for introducing continuous testing into your development, you’ll see positive changes begin to occur quickly.