Understand DevOps by Understanding Continuous Testing 

The success of software products largely depends on the timely control of market demand. Using DevOps can speed up product delivery and improve the user experience, thus helping to maintain the advantage ahead of the competitors.

As an extension of agile development methodology, DevOps emphasizes the cooperation and communication between different teams in development, testing, operation, and maintenance.

Continuous integration and continuous testing is a process of building, testing a product, and fixing a Bug during an iteration. It helps the team detect flaws in the early development phase when they are often relatively less complex and easier to resolve. With continuous integration and ongoing testing, businesses can minimize error risk as soon as possible and accelerate the delivery of better quality software.

Benefits of Continuous Testing in DevOps for Product Development

• Periodic risk analysis: You will have a build version that has undergone all the testing stages because continuous testing marks the potential risks of each phase.
• Improve the user experience: Continuous testing to meet the user's dynamic needs. The team can constantly update based on the feedback to make the product more robust, flexible, and reliable.
• Enhance product safety: Protect applications from threats and malware by creating support systems.
• Plan feedback: Evaluate all architectural layers of the delivery pipeline and share executable feedback with the team.
• Higher resource utilization: as mentioned earlier, early bugs can save money and resources. You can leverage best practices in continuous testing and defect prevention strategies and redeploy valuable resources to other strategic development plans.

The Role of Continuous Testing in DevOps Continuous testing provides a continuous feedback mechanism during the DevOps process and acts as a catalyst in the whole product delivery pipeline. Automatic feedback at each stage ensures that defects are resolved early in the development process.

Source: DevOps

Actionable feedback is necessary to initiate the following process in the delivery chain. For example, if the feedback appears correct and the process will continue. If the feedback indicates a problem, the process needs to be suspended and corrective action is taken.

Continuous testing conducted by a professional testing team evaluates the software-related business risks in real-time. In addition, it provides risk-based feedback that helps to help teams make better trade-off decisions.

Practice of Continuous Testing in the DevOps

1. Left or Right Shift of the Test
   Traditional testing mainly focuses on the end of the software development cycle, before the product release. To cater to the accelerating delivery frequency, more and more teams are starting to move their testing activities to the left and right. The general difficulty repair cost is higher and for the enterprise charging software, once the issue in the production environment causes a relatively significant loss, usually take the way of test left shift; For software products with a display function, because it is easier to find problems in the production environment, the test is usually shifted to the right. In terms of test uncertainty, this diagram can be used to illustrate how to implement tests in DevOps.

   
   Source: DevOps
   Test shift left means that the tester participated earlier in the early activities of the software project, defined the relevant test cases before the function development, and found the quality problems in advance. Early introduction of the testing process helps prevent defects and gives developers the flexibility to apply dynamic changes throughout the development phase.
   Test shift right is monitored directly in the production environment and obtains user feedback in real-time. In this approach, feedback is collected from the user side. According to the user feedback, continuously improve the user experience satisfaction of the product and improve the product quality. Moving the test right helps to better respond to unexpected situations.

2. Continuous Integration
   

   The ideal DevOps cycle is a one-click deployment from code development to production environment operations. DevOps attaches great importance to the automation of construction, testing, and deployment, and using continuous integration becomes the basis for continuous testing. An essential step in achieving continuous testing is to create a comprehensive automated test suite for use in continuous integration builds, validated immediately after the code is submitted. The typical automated test suite consists of unit tests, component testing, and acceptance tests, where each code or function coverage reaches at least 80% to guarantee no regression problems.

3. Make Improving Test Coverage More Efficient
   

   DevOps practice requires increased code coverage and increased coverage at lower levels available so that no issues related to code coverage arise when deployed to higher advanced availability.

   Some organizations default to ‘run all tests every time to ensure code coverage. This wastes resources and prolongs the test cycle, and there is no guarantee of code coverage. We need to test those parts that need testing to save time, money, and resources. Visualization models allow various pathways to be explored and optimized to provide maximum coverage with only a few test cases. You can import test cases, remove duplicate use cases, and distribute optimized use cases with tools such as Rally, HP ALM, and ZenTao ZTF.

4. Interdepartmental Collaboration
   

   
   Source：DevOps
   Quality assurance in the DevOps is no longer the exclusive responsibility of the testers but the direction that all the staff has to work for. The successful implementation of continuous testing is inseparable from intra-team, inter-team, and cross-team collaboration. Testers need to intervene in the development work in advance and make the test plan with the developers; developers can participate in the configuration and deployment; operation and maintenance personnel can fill in the test cases to the automated test case library; Testers configure automated test cases into the continuous delivery chain at any time. The common goal of all members is to deliver efficient and high-quality products.

Conclusion

DevOps breaks down the barriers between development and operations, shortening the development cycle. Continuous integration, continuous testing, and continuous delivery are the key catalysts to improve quality, and continuous testing is more challenging. Mastering the continuous testing of the DevOps life cycle plays a crucial role in fully understanding the DevOps.