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8 Tips to Optimize Your Continuous Testing Strategy

May 8th, 2024 by

In today’s competitive digital landscape, businesses are under constant pressure to accelerate their software development cycles and enhance digital capabilities. Although automation has become a staple in the software development lexicon, a surprising number of organizations—only 30% according to recent studies—have fully adopted automation testing. This gap highlights a significant opportunity: many companies invest heavily in digital transformations but fail to integrate comprehensive testing strategies, limiting their potential gains. 

Continuous testing stands out as a critical methodology designed to align with the rapid pace of modern development cycles. This approach not only helps in detecting errors early in the development process but also ensures that software products consistently meet quality standards before reaching consumers. 

What is Continuous Testing?

Continuous testing is an advanced software testing strategy that involves evaluating software quality at every stage of the software development lifecycle (SDLC). This is done to identify defects early, thereby enhancing the quality of the final product while ensuring business continuity. It is a vital component of DevOps and Agile practices, integrating seamlessly with these methodologies to support continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD). 

Key Features of Continuous Testing:

  • Immediate Feedback: Enables developers to receive immediate feedback on the impact of their changes. 
  • Automated Testing: Utilizes automation tools to conduct tests repeatedly during multiple phases of development. 
  • Quality Metrics: Provides ongoing insight into the quality and readiness of the product throughout its development. 

An effective continuous testing strategy is pivotal for organizations aiming to maintain robust software delivery pipelines. Here are detailed strategies and practices to enhance the efficacy of continuous testing frameworks. 

continuous testing strategy

Challenges to an Effective Continuous Testing Strategy

Before exploring optimization strategies, it’s crucial to address the common obstacles that enterprises face: As organizations increasingly seek to accelerate their software deployment cycles, many grapple with significant challenges that hinder the effective implementation of a continuous testing strategy. Here are some key challenges: 

  1. Balancing Speed and Quality: A primary challenge in continuous testing is striking a balance between the speed of delivery and the quality of outputs. Rapid releases often sacrifice thorough testing, leading to potential bugs and performance issues.

  2. Integration with Existing Processes: Many organizations face difficulties integrating continuous testing into their established development workflows, especially those that have traditionally relied on manual testing. This shift requires significant changes in both the tools used and the organizational culture.

  3. High Initial Setup Costs: Establishing a robust continuous testing setup requires considerable investment in tools, infrastructure, and training. This can be a significant barrier, particularly for smaller organizations.

  4. Choosing the Right Tools: Selecting appropriate and effective testing tools is crucial and challenging, given the vast array of available options. The wrong choice can lead to inefficiencies and inadequate coverage.

  5. Managing Test Data: Effective test data management is essential but challenging. Ensuring that data is relevant, secure, and compliant with regulations requires sophisticated strategies.

  6. Environmental and Technical Limitations: Providing stable and scalable test environments that accurately mirror production settings can be technically complex and costly.

  7. Flaky Tests and False Positives: Automated tests may sometimes return inconsistent results or false positives, which can undermine confidence in the testing process and cause real issues to be overlooked.

  8. Keeping Up with Changing Technologies: The rapid pace of technological advancement means that continuous testing strategies must constantly evolve to accommodate new technologies and platforms, which can be resource-intensive.

  9. Scaling Tests with Development: As applications grow in complexity, scaling testing processes without a corresponding increase in time and resources poses a significant challenge.

These challenges underscore the necessity of a well-thought-out continuous testing strategy that is adaptable, scalable, and efficient to support the dynamic nature of modern software development.

8 Tips to Optimize your Continuous Testing Strategy

Test automation strategy is the backbone of the final product that a business delivers. It should be strong and flexible enough to bear the impact of any change and every variable of the testing process. Let’s discuss how optimizing continuous delivery testing strategy helps improving the testing process and to increase the software quality: 

1. Complete Test Automation Strategy

Research indicates that many organizations tend to prioritize specific testing approaches—some focus on API integration and UI testing, while others may address these areas separately. However, a critical gap often exists in their lack of a detailed, automated continuous integration testing strategy that encompasses all these testing types. While selecting a particular testing method may be appropriate for certain business scenarios, it’s crucial for companies to develop a versatile testing plan. This plan should be capable of incorporating any testing type as needed. Understanding the distinctions and applications of continuous testing versus test automation is essential, given the varying scales and needs of businesses.

2. Streamlined Initial Test Process

Incorporating unreliable and overly complex test cases early in the development process can result in significant waste of time and resources, as QA teams are forced to engage in ineffective analysis of each code commit. To avoid this, it’s advisable for QA teams to start with a minimal set of test suites. This approach helps mitigate major risks while allowing for incremental adjustments based on the impact observed. Over time, the focus should be on gradually integrating more robust and stable test cases. In a DevOps environment, the quality of test cases is far more critical than the quantity executed. 

3. Choosing the best test automation tool

In building a comprehensive continuous testing strategy, choosing the right test automation tool is not just a requirement—it’s a cornerstone for achieving complete stability in your development process. It’s essential to select a tool that not only fits the technical requirements of your projects but also enhances operational efficiencies.   

One standout category in the realm of test automation tools is that which offers codeless automation alongside self-healing capabilities. Codeless test automation tools are designed to enable users to create automated tests without writing extensive lines of code. This approach significantly lowers the barrier to entry for team members who may not have traditional programming skills but are nevertheless integral to the testing process. It allows subject matter experts, business analysts, and QA professionals to directly contribute to test automation efforts. 

In a continuous testing environment, where quick iterations and frequent releases are common, the agility offered by a codeless, self-healing test automation tool becomes even more valuable. By automating tests without requiring extensive coding skills, teams can rapidly create and adapt tests to evolving application features and requirements. The self-healing aspect ensures that these tests remain valid and reliable over time, even as the application undergoes changes, thereby supporting a truly continuous approach to testing and development. 

Moreover, such tools can significantly reduce time and maintenance costs associated with the lifecycle of automated tests. They enhance the reusability of test scripts and ensure a higher return on investment by minimizing the need for frequent manual updates and intervention. 

By choosing a codeless automation tool with self-healing features, organizations can enhance their testing capabilities, accelerate their time to market, and ensure that their testing strategies can adapt to the dynamic nature of modern software environments.  

4. Modularizing tests

For complex integrated applications, modular testing offers an effective strategy to simplify and manage functionality. By decomposing the application into distinct modules, teams can create a clear roadmap that aligns testing processes with different workflows. Modular testing facilitates the organization and restructuring of tests by separating test data, test flows, and element locator mappings. This approach not only streamlines the testing process but also enhances the adaptability and maintainability of the test suites. 

5. Leveraging Automated Screenshots

Automated screenshots are invaluable for diagnosing the reasons behind test failures. They provide a visual reference that can be crucial for in-depth analysis of issues encountered during test execution. A robust automation tool should be capable of capturing screenshots at key interaction points automatically. However, not all tools support this feature. If your current test automation solution lacks this functionality, it may be worthwhile to consider switching to another platform that does, to fully benefit from the diagnostic advantages of automated screenshots. 

6. Optimizing Test Automation ROI

With the rise of continuous testing, automation, and DevOps, alongside the demand for faster delivery, the standards for quality software have significantly increased. Companies are striving to stay competitive by refining their testing and development strategies, all while keeping costs low. Managing test execution costs is essential. As testing scales up, the use of cloud resources becomes necessary, which can be costly. An effective strategy would be to differentiate between high and low-level testing requirements—conduct more complex integration and compatibility tests on the cloud, and run basic tests on-premise. This approach helps maintain a cost balance while maximizing automation ROI. 

7. Tracking and Monitoring

When development and operations teams collaborate, numerous operational challenges emerge. Developers aim to deploy updates swiftly, while testers focus on ensuring the reliability of service delivery. Bridging this gap requires continuous testing and integration within DevOps frameworks. To effectively manage these challenges, investing in system monitoring tools is crucial. These tools help identify the root causes of discrepancies and failures, enhancing overall efficiency. 

8. Benefits of Outsourcing QA

Outsourcing the QA process provides additional support, giving businesses a competitive advantage in delivering high-quality services. In the realm of continuous testing, outsourcing offers a significant boost by providing access to specialized areas such as impact analysis, performance, and security testing. This focused approach injects vital energy into specific phases of the development lifecycle, creating a mutually beneficial scenario for both developers and testers.

Continuous Testing and Delivery is not a luxury but a necessity in today’s era. A well designed continuous testing strategy is the foundation of continuous testing and quality service delivery. Although the journey is full of challenges if planned meticulously, the businesses would be able to streamline and reap the maximum benefits of test automation and continuous testing.

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CI/CD Pipeline: Demystifying The Complexities

February 19th, 2024 by

Industry leaders consider CI/CD to be an essential part of the app development cycle as enterprises are keen to reduce the time to market. Continuous integration and continuous delivery help in improving and enhancing the quality of the product while reducing the cost of the project. This blog will help you understand the of a functioning CI/CD pipeline, its challenges, and its benefits. Before we get into the details, let’s have a look at the basic terminology.

  • Continuous Integration

Continuous integration (CI) is a software development practice where developers frequently make changes in the code and add it to the central repository after which automated tests are run. CI is the integration stage of the software release process which depends on automation and constant integration. The main goal is to find the bugs and resolve the issue quickly to improve the software quality and reduce the time to market.

In continuous integration, developers focus on smaller commits several times a day. Developers pull the code from the repository before pushing it to the build server where the build server runs various tests to verify the code commit.

  • Continuous Delivery

Continuous delivery is a software development practice that ensures a faster and stable release of the changes in the code. In this, the changes are automatically built, tested, and prepared for production release. The code changes are deployed to a testing environment or a production environment after the build stage is completed. When continuous delivery is implemented, developers always have a deployment-ready build artifact that has passed through a standard test process. In continuous development, the code revisions to a production environment automatically which allows for a continuous feedback loop early in the development cycle.

  • Continuous Deployment

Continuous deployment is a bit similar to continuous delivery but is a step further towards process automation. The change that passes through all the production stages is released to the client directly without the need for any human intervention. Continuous deployment accelerates the feedback loop as only a failed test will stop the change from getting deployed to production.
Continuous Deployment

  • Continuous Testing

It is the practice of executing automated tests throughout the software development life cycle. Instead of the old testing method where testing occurs at the end of the software development cycle, CT occurs at multiple stages, including development, integration, pre-release, and in production. It is done to ensures that bugs are caught and fixed at the earlier stages in the development process, saving a significant amount of time and money.

continuous testing

While building an application that will be deployed on the live servers there will be a team of developers responsible to write the code. The developers commit the code into a version control system like Git, from where it goes to the build phase. The built is then sent to the next phase with a proper version tag.

For instance, you have a code that needs to be compiled before execution. When the code enters the built phase, all the features of the code are merged from various repositories and compiled using a compiler.

The next phase is the testing phase where various types of testing are performed. Sanity testing and unit testing are the most crucial part of this process as individual units of the built are tested to check if they meet the requirements.

The builds are moved to the deployment phase after passing the test and then pushed into a test server. Here developers simulate the product in a production-like environment to examine the features.
What is a CI/CD Pipeline?

Before the build features are deployed to production, the automation test phase will perform the final tests to qualify the features. continuous testing is implemented in this phase to ensure there are no bugs remaining.

In case there is an error at any stage of the CI/CD pipeline, feedback will be sent to the development team so that issues are addressed immediately. Thereafter, code changes will go through the production pipeline once again.

In the final phase, the code is moved to the production server after code passes all the tests. The constant feedback loop helps make the CI/CD pipeline a closed process where builds are continuously committed, tested, and deployed to production.

Challenges in CI/CD Pipeline

Limited environments

During the CI/CD pipeline implementation, a limited number of shared test environments increases the risks of a bottleneck. You would need to reserve an environment to avoid multiple CI/CD pipelines running side by side from attempting to deploy and test in the same environment. One of the leading causes of deployment failures is misconfigured environments modified by previous teams or test runs.

Security and Ownership

Sometimes it’s difficult to know who needs to fix the pipeline when the stages fail as delivery pipelines span multiple teams in an organization. An owner has to be assigned at every stage of the CI/CD pipeline who will be responsible to fix the issues and ensuring that the delivery runs smoothly. The owner will also contribute to the feedback-driven improvement of the pipeline.

The orchestration tool used by the team should have an effective security model that could provide better visibility into the state of the entire CI/CD pipeline. For instance, to identify the causes of test failure, the team would have to examine the result of the test phase. But they should not be given permission to modify or disable the configuration of that test step.

Managing multiple custom CI/CD pipelines

There will be multiple CI/CD pipelines in large organizations as they have diverse portfolios spanning different departments, technology platforms, and customers. It would be difficult to analyze metrics like throughput, successful execution, and cycle time if every pipeline ends at different stages in the delivery process. It’s easier to manage a large set of CI/CD pipelines if each one is based on a standard template. This will help in meaningful comparative reporting and it will provide useful feedback to improve other pipelines.

Massive applications

Large apps with several components that need to be compiled, tested and deployed are tough to update incrementally which leads to long testing and deployment cycles. It’s harder to perform quality control and root cause analysis as multiple teams commit several changes at the same time. It’s difficult to create a standardized delivery pipeline as the release process needs to differ slightly. Teams often initiate a workstream to incrementally break out components of the app into different modules so that they can be built and deployed separately, allowing for faster feedback cycles with smaller sets of code changes.

Complex Branching Strategies: Navigating complex branching strategies can be a significant challenge in CI/CD pipelines. Without a clear and consistent strategy, such as GitFlow or trunk-based development, teams may struggle with merge conflicts, delayed features, and integration issues. Establishing a streamlined branching strategy that aligns with the CI/CD objectives is crucial for minimizing integration headaches and facilitating continuous integration.

Handling Dependencies: Modern applications often rely on numerous external libraries and services. Managing these dependencies can become a challenge, particularly when updates to dependencies break the build or introduce vulnerabilities. Effective dependency management tools and practices, such as semantic versioning and automated dependency updates, are essential to maintain the stability and security of the CI/CD pipeline.

Flaky Tests: Automated tests are the backbone of CI/CD pipelines, ensuring that code changes do not introduce regressions. However, flaky tests, which produce inconsistent results, can undermine confidence in the build process. Addressing test flakiness requires a disciplined approach to test writing, including isolating tests from external dependencies and ensuring that tests are deterministic.

Scaling the Pipeline: As projects grow in complexity and team size, scaling the CI/CD pipeline can become a challenge. Issues such as increased build times, resource contention, and the management of parallel jobs need to be addressed. Techniques such as build matrix reduction, parallel test execution, and the use of scalable cloud resources can help maintain pipeline efficiency at scale.

Third-Party Integrations: CI/CD pipelines often integrate with various third-party services for code analysis, deployment, monitoring, and more. Managing these integrations, especially when dealing with API rate limits, service downtimes, or incompatible updates, requires careful planning and fallback mechanisms to ensure the pipeline’s resilience.

Avoiding Configuration Drift: Ensuring consistency across development, testing, staging, and production environments is crucial. Configuration drift, where environments become inconsistent over time, can lead to “works on my machine” issues and deployment failures. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools and practices can help mitigate this risk by codifying environment configurations and making them part of the version-controlled repository.

Skill Gaps: Implementing and maintaining a CI/CD pipeline requires a broad set of skills, including coding, automation, infrastructure management, and security. Talent gaps in these areas can hinder the effectiveness of CI/CD initiatives. Continuous learning and cross-training, along with the hiring or consulting with experts, are strategies to overcome these challenges.

Why CI/CD matters

CI/CD provides several benefits for your software development team including improving developer productivity, automating the process, improving code quality, and delivering updates to your customers faster. Let’s have a look at some more benefits of implementing a CI/CD pipeline.

Improve Developer Productivity

CI/CD practices enhance your team’s productivity by freeing developers from manual tasks, working on complex dependencies, and returning focus to delivering new features. Instead of integrating their code with other parts of the business and spending time on how to deploy this code to a platform, developers can focus on coding logic that delivers the features you need.

Automated Software Release Process

Continuous delivery provides a method for your team to check-in code that is automatically built, tested, and prepared for release to production so that your software delivery is efficient, resilient, rapid, and secure.

Improve Code Quality

CD can help you discover and address bugs early in the delivery process before they grow into larger problems later. Your team can easily perform additional types of code tests because the entire process has been automated. With the discipline of more testing more frequently, teams can iterate faster with immediate feedback on the impact of changes. This enables teams to drive quality code with a high assurance of stability and security. Developers will know through immediate feedback whether the new code works and whether any breaking changes or bugs were introduced. Mistakes caught early on in the development process are the easiest to fix.

Deliver Updates Faster

CD helps your team deliver updates to customers quickly and frequently. When CI/CD is implemented, the velocity of the entire team, including the release of features and bug fixes, is increased. Enterprises can respond faster to market changes, security challenges, customer needs, and cost pressures. For example, if a new security feature is required, your team can implement CI/CD with automated testing to introduce the fix quickly and reliably to production systems with high confidence. What used to take weeks and months can now be done in days or even hours.

In a Nutshell

Continuous integration and continuous delivery is an ideal solution for an organization’s app development teams. Developers just need to push the code to a repository. The code will be integrated, tested, deployed, tested again, merged with infrastructure, go through security and quality reviews, and be ready to deploy with extremely high confidence. A CI/CD pipeline helps improve code quality and software updates are delivered quickly.

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10 Best Continuous Integration Tools In 2023

February 27th, 2023 by

Technology is growing exponentially and to be in the game, organisations have no choice but to be technologically enabled. Talking about ‘technology’ basically means creating solutions that are ‘faster, ‘convenient’ and ‘qualitative’. To keep up with the highly demanding technological dynamics, not only human resources need to be equipped with the contemporaneous developments of this industry but there is also a dire need of highly standardized processes in order to deliver the top-class results. That’s when the need of DevOps emerges. Right from the planning through delivery, the idea of introducing DevOps is to maintain the quality streak by a systematic collaboration of development and automation across the continuous delivery and continuous Integration. To make it simpler, there must be a convenient way to tackle the complicated scenarios without delays and for on time delivery. Hence, the introduction of Continuous integration tools makes it easier for the developers to streamline the development processes.

Continuous Integration methodology enables developers to provide immediate reporting whenever any defect is identified in the code so that immediate corrective action can be taken. It is an important part of DevOps that bis used to integrate various Devops stages. The testing process is also automated and the same is instantly reported to the user. There are innumerable Continuous Integration tools available in the market providing access to different unique features. These have open source as well as paid versions, depending upon the need of the user, the most preferred could be selected. Although all the continuous Integration tools are designed to perform the same basic functions but choosing the best suitable CI tool becomes important in the long run. Depending upon many factors like features, cost, ease of use, etc. more than one tools can also be chosen meeting varied needs and not just the single solution. Comparing the best continuous Integration tools that are available in the market, below is the list of 10 best and mostly used Continuous Integration tools which must not be ignored in 2023.

Continuous Integration Tools

1. Jenkins

Jenkins is a known and the most common Continuous Integration tool available today. Based on various comparisons, Jenkins tops the list. Jenkins is opensource continuous Integration server-based application that allows developers to build, automate and test any software project at a faster pace. It was originally a part of Hudson project started by Kohsuke Kawaguchi in the year 2004 but it was later on released by the name Jenkins in the year 2011. The tool has evolved over the years and has become the most reliable software delivery automation tool. The source code is in JAVA with few Groovy, Ruby and Antlr files. It has almost 1400 plugins to support the automation of the development tasks. Jenkins supports the entire software development life cycle right from building, testing, documenting and deploying. Jenkins comes with WAR file that allows easy installation of the tool which needs to be dropped into the JEE container and the setup can be run easily henceforth.

Key Features:

1. It is an open-source server for Continuous Integration tool
2. It is written in JAVA and comes with thousands of plugins that help in build, automation and deployment of any software project
3. It can be installed easily on any operating systems
4. User friendly interface that is easy to configure and with easy upgrades.

2. Buddy

Buddy is a web-based, self- hosted Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) tool also known as Buddy.Works.Buddy is a serious advancement as one of the trusted CI CD tools. It has an extremely friendly user-interface and is also the simplest tool to use for the web developers, designers and quality assurance teams. Git developers can use this tool for building, testing and deploying the websites and applications using Github, Bitbucket, GitLab codes.

Key Features:

1. Steps for launching containers, automating deployment, and setting up
monitoring can be easily customised
2. Build, Ship and Deploy as inbuilt stack feature
3. Can be deployed to any hosting and cloud service providers
4. Supports Grunt. Gulp, MongoDB, and MySQL
5. Real-time reports on progress, logs and history can be monitored
6. Docker based builds and tests.

3.TeamCity

Teamcity, first released in 2006 is a continuous Integration tool developed by JetBrains. It runs in Java environment and is used to build and deploy different projects. It supports integration with many cloud technologies like Microsoft Azure, VMWare, Amazon.

Key Features:

1. It is a free of cost Continuous Integration tool
2. Supports platforms like Java, .Net and Ruby
3. Allows easy integration with IDEs like Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA, Visual studio
4. Allows code coverage, inspection and performs duplicates check and creates history
reports of any changes made
5. It supports running multiple builds and tests under different platforms and
environments.

4. Bamboo CI

Bamboo is another Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) software developed by Altassian. It is written in Java and supports other languages and technologies like CodeDeply, Ducker, Maven, Git, SVN, Mercurial, Ant, AWS, Amazon, etc. The tool performs automatic build, testing and deployments. Automation thus saves time and allows developers some extra time to focus on the strategic aspects of the product.

Key Features:

1. Bamboo can build, test and deploy multiple projects simultaneously and in case of any build failure, it provides the analysis and the failure reports
2. Current status of the builds and server status can be monitored with the help of the REST API provided by Bamboo
3. Bamboo supports testing tools like PHPUnit, JUnit, Selenium
4.It is compatible with JIRA and BitBucket
5. Bamboo is related to other products like JIRA, Confluence and Clover by Altassian allowing the developers and the other team members to be at the same page
6. It can also import data from Jenkins.

5.GitLab CI

GitLab Continuous Integration tool is a complete code management platform with multiple mini tools each performing a different set of function for the complete SDLC. It is owned by GitLab Inc and was created by engineers Dmitriy Zaporozhets and Valery Sizov . It provides important analysis on the code views, bug management,CI CD in a single web-based repository which also makes it the most demanded CI CD tool. GitLab CI is written in Ruby and Go and its  core functionality is released under an open-source MIT license, keeping rest of the functions under proprietary license.

Key Features:

1. It is directly integrated with the GitLab Workflow
2. Allows all critical information on the code progress in a single dashboard
3. Free for the community edition, the enterprise version is paid one
4. Language Programming CMD build scripts available allowing to program them in
any language
5. APIs are provided to allow better product integrations

6.Circle CI

Circle CI is one of the best Continuous Integration and Delivery tool available in the market. CircleCI provides a great platform for build and test automation along with comprehensive deployment process. It can be integrated with GitHub, GitHub Enterprise and Bitbucket to create builds. It also supports on-cloud Continuous Integration. Because of its strong features and efficient performance in this space, it is highly recommended by experts.

Key Features:

1. It easily Integrates with Bitbucket, GitHub, and GitHub Enterprise
2. It allows branch focused deployment
3. It performs easy bug-cleanup, runs tests quickly and is highly customizable
4. Easily integrates with AWS, Google cloud and other services
5. Build tools like Maven, Gradle can be easily integrated

7.Codeship

Codeship Continuous Integration tool was acquired by Cloudbees. It is praised by its users for its combination of features for build and deployment. It is efficient, simple and deploys directly from the Github and Bitbucket. Its features of integration and delivery are combined in such a way that it makes more reliable deployment as soon as the code is automatically tested.

Key Features:

1. It allows a very supportive environment when it comes to compatibility with different technologies, languages, deployment in different environments of choice.
2. It has a very fast and strong developer support and is very easy to use.
3. It also supports third party tools integration very well.
4.It requires a single sign-up for Github, Bitbucket and Gitlab
5. Allows simple file management configuration, easy monitoring and scale-up as per the need.

8. Cruise Control

CruiseControl is a Java based Continuous Integration platform. It is popular for allowing various source controls, email notifications and build technologies with the help of plugins. It is written in Java and has versions of .Net (CCNet) and Ruby (CruiseControl.rb.) as well.

Key Features:

1. Supplies builders for Ant, Nant, Maven, Phing, Rake, and Xcode.
2. It is an Open source Framework
3. Allows Custom build loops for build cycles
4.Its web interface provides visual status of the builds
5. Provides JSP Reporting for managing build results

9. BuildBot

Buildbot is a software development continuous integration platform that allows automatic compilation and testing in order to validate any changes occurred in the project. It is written in Python. Originally created by Brian Warner, it is now maintained by the developer Dustin Michelle. It is popular for performing complex automation testing of the Development Life Cycle processes and for application deployment. This is among one of those tools that allow distribution and execution of programs parallelly on different platforms.

Key Features:

1. It is an Open source Continuous Integration Platform
2. Automates complex building, application deployment and manages complicated software releases
3. Allows time estimation of build completion as it provides real-time insights of the build progress.
4. Uses Python, C and host requirements of Python and Twisted
5. Supports distributed, parallel execution across multiple platforms and provides extensive status reporting

10. GoCD

GoCD Continuous Integration server is owned by Thoughtworks. It streamlines the build, automation and deployments of complex build cycles. Its top USP is to enable plugins or design custom plugins for any requirements during the CI CD process. It follows business continuity concept under which it sets up multiple servers is possible in order to keep the data readily available at the time of emergency. It is compatible with Windows, OSX, AWS AMIs, Docker, Debian/APT, RPM/YUM, and Zip. It can run tests in multiple languages and provides robust reports on the insights.

Key Features:

1. It is an opensource Continuous Integration server.
2.It allows the deployment of any preferable versions of applications
3.It easily configures the dependencies based on the last report and allows on
demand deployments
4. There are numerous plugins available for this and can also be customized as per the
requirement.
5. It re-uses the pipeline configuration keeping the configuration organized with the
help of its template system
6. The entire workflow can be tackled and watched with good tracking and feedback
system allowing the developer to track changes from committing through
deployment at a single place.

Conclusion

The above list of best Continuous Integration tools describes each of the ten tools in detail and covers the best of all along with their main features. This information is insightful for those who still haven’t thought of inculcating these automation tools to build and deploy various aspects of the Software development projects. Continuous Integration, delivery and deployment are very critical and complex systems in the Software theory. They need to be handled with care in order to fetch great results. Choosing the right tool for your business would certainly help handle this responsibility well. It is not about choosing one best tool, but multiple tools can also be selected based on the requirements of the project. As the CI CD continues to grow and evolve, it leaves the innovators with more chances to explore on creating the best versions of such tools.

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How Continuous Testing in DevOps enables quality in the CI/CD Pipeline

July 16th, 2020 by

We all understand the importance of software testing and how it transforms the goodwill of the business by enabling delivery of quality product to its clients in shorter delivery cycles. It becomes challenging to run the test cases manually by evaluating the quality of each line of code at every step of the continuous Delivery process. This is where Continuous testing in DevOps comes into picture.

Continuous testing in DevOps Pipeline

 
In traditional ways of testing the software used to pass through different development and QA phases which took more time until the final delivery of the product. According to a research by Gartner, Continuous testing in DevOps is aimed at providing early and quick detection of signs of risks related to the product release. DevOps Continuous Testing is an inevitable activity of the delivery process rather than just a mere stage in the delivery process. The main purpose is to inculcate quality into the CI/CD pipeline by utilizing the key benefits of continuous testing in DevOps.
 
Continuous Testing in DevOps
DevOps Continuous testing is a critical aspect responsible for seamless Continuous Delivery. It involves the usage of agile development methods and processes into the QA process further providing a productive testing process.
 
Here are a few points to understand the benefits of Continuous testing in DevOps at the deeper levels:
 
a. Provides Sustained Risk Analysis:
 
There has never been any code build that is error free and in a ready-to-release form. Even if the final release candidate has come without any glitches, passes all the tests, it has to be ‘prepared well’ for the final release and approved by the business leaders. Continuous Testing evaluates the code at a deeper level to estimate all the possible risks connected to it so that a corrective action could be taken at the right time without breaking the ‘continuous delivery’ chain.
 
b. Cuts down the feedback cycle:
 
The key benefit of continuous testing is that it evaluates the code layer by layer at each stage of delivery pipeline, allowing testers to understand the source of the problem. The actionable insights helps the QA team to act on time and avoid longer queues
 
c. Broader Test Coverage:
 
A broad range of tests can be applied throughout the testing process with the help of continuous testing tools for DevOps such as Selenium, etc. It covers both functional and non-functional testing types to increase test coverage by emulating testing like cross-browser testing, API testing, regression testing, integrated testing, unit testing and non-functional testing like security, reliability, scalability, usability and many more.
 
d. Delivering High Quality Product:
 
‘Test-early-test-often’ is the key mantra of continuous testing which is self explicable. In order to ensure delivery of high-quality product to the end user, there needs to be a process to continuously monitor the progress along the entire delivery pipeline. Achieving high product quality is the result of continuous testing that strives to finding and addressing risks effectively and by gaining feedback at the early phases of software development lifecycle.
 
e. Faster Software Delivery:
 
The whole point of introducing Continuous Testing in DevOps is to speed up the product delivery cycle. Following a multi-point testing at different stages allows the QA team to detect the glitches early and take quick corrective actions so that the final delivery is not impacted.
 
f. Easy Integration with the DevOps Process:
 
Continuous testing seamlessly integrated with the DevOps process right from the early stages of the development process rather than functioning just before the release. Continuous integration into the software pipeline enables quick fixes so that the development process can be aligned with the business requirements on time.

Tools for continuous testing in DevOps

 
For a seamless experience in the entire CI CD process, Continuous testing has to be supported by the best tools for continuous testing in DevOps. For performing smooth Continuous Testing, the Automation Framework has to be integrated with the CI tool, version control and various automated continuous testing DevOps tools to execute different types of testing at various stages of the process. For example, :
 

  • Using Selenium for performing functional testing
  • Load runner for performing load testing at its best,
  • Secure code analysis using Fortify and static code analysis using Sonar, etc.

 
Apart from these there are many other trusted DevOps Continuous testing tools available in the market for an efficient continuous testing, like JIRA, Jenkins, Bamboo, Docker, Appium, SoapUI, PagerDuty, CodeCluster etc. The concern is that not all the tools support comprehensive automation solution. Some organizations prefer to create self-made automation frameworks depending upon the version control used to enable complete automation of the CD pipeline.
 
Since Continuous testing is the most critical aspect to be covered by the business in order to achieve quality product release, it has to be backed by the choice of right, suitable tools and frameworks to achieve speedy and quality delivery.

Challenges in DevOps Continuous Testing and how to overcome them

 
Even after understanding the advantages of adopting continuous testing in the DevOps process, many organizations face the challenges of successful implementation of it. Establishment of an efficient automation framework is a daunting deal as it involves a huge investment, expertise and effort. Moreover, the organizations are not equipped with the scalable infrastructure to run tests continuously. Also, without a strong coordination among the product, development and testing team, this seems even tougher. Although there are challenges in successful adoption of Continuous testing, with a little sensibility one can overcome it. Here are a few of the key points to comply in order to overcome the challenges :
 

  • By proper team engagement, the cultural and communication barriers can be dealt with enabling the SDLC team to have better coordination, collaboration and understanding of the scenarios.
  • Reducing unnecessary and extensive testing plans, the focus should be on keeping it simple and logical. Instead, the energy could be diverted to more important test objects in order to create much better measurable results.
  • Automation would ease the successful implementation of continuous testing in DevOps. Well, complete automation isn’t achievable but more the process automation, easier it becomes to carry on the continuous testing.
  • Carry out testing at all stages of production and QA environment would continuously providing feedback to developers to improvise on the product quality.
  • Last but not the least, implementing artificial intelligence and other intelligence programs for problem solving and to think beyond automation at every stage of delivery would boost up the SDLC.

 
By now we all know how significant continuous testing in DevOps for any business. It essentially brings together all the stages of designing, developing and deploying the software. Merely providing a software product does not help but providing best products faster than the competitors would be the key differentiator of your business. If practiced earnestly, it provides consistent insights about the software development to ensure speedy delivery.
 

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