Adapting To The Needs For Test Automation In The World Of Continuous Integration

Today's software development industry sees a lot of demand for and usage of the terms continuous integration, deployment/delivery, and testing. Many organizations have done a good job of adapting to the demands of the "continuous" world, and their overall delivery methods are mature. There are some others who are on their way there or are still overwhelmed by the amount of work required to get there. As testing services providers including test automation across all testing attributes most questions that we see are around the following:

1. What are the requirements for implementing core functional test automation in the world of continuous testing, and what happens to manual testing efforts?
2. What about continuous testing of other attributes such as performance, security, accessibility etc.

Let’s look at both one by one. For an organization that is fairly new to test automation and has largely been focusing on its test efforts only manually, the first step is to build a robust stand-alone test automation suite. This is a suite that includes the overall test automation scenarios based on what percentage the organization’s test strategy has been finalized on. Within such a suite, the right prioritization around smoke/sanity, regression etc. will be identified. The goal here is two-fold – build a very robust automation suite on core automation best practices making maintenance effort as low as possible and secondly bundling them in the most effective way so they can be run in an unattended manner in the continuous integration world. 

While organizations may choose to do these in an “n1” sprint sequence, the whole idea is to very soon get into an “in sprint” automation cycle to handle the automation engineering and execution within the current sprint. Meet more examples by following the link. Just as how the whole idea of continuous integration is to bring in as much agility and granularity as possible to catch issues early on when they are easy to find and cheap to fix, the testing scope and ownership should also be broken down into pieces where the testers are able to bring in self-discipline once the core goals have been identified across the test team. Once this is done, the tester is also able to determine the extra coverage on top of the automation suite to handle manually – this also calls for all testers especially manual testers, to gain proficiency in the space of automation, especially with how easy automation tools and frameworks have evolved to be enabling everyone take up automation.

Today the key to a successful tester is not how good a manual tester you are, but how good a balanced tester you have become, able to manage both automated tests and take up creative user centric flows manually.

The other area companies are pondering with, is building a reliable automation suite for non-functional workflows to also fit into the CI/CD space. This is also not rocket science. At the end of the day it is all about how you have made your choices – your choice around which are the core tests you want included in the regression suite since not every test needs to be run with every build (from cost of run and time of run standpoints), how reliable the regression suite is and which are the ones that can be covered in a non-regression cycle. Once these are determined it is a matter of integrating the select tests from the standalone suite into the integrated suite.

At the end of the day, CI/CD driven test automation calls for as much discipline and awareness amongst testers, as it does for developers – once this has been understood and applied, adapting is just a process that follows.

Automation testing's function in CI/CD

Implementing CI/CD in a meaningful and efficient way is made possible by automation. The foundation of any such pipeline is automation testing. This is due to the CI/CD philosophy, which is "build fast, test fast, fail fast."

In order for the developer to receive feedback as soon as possible, tests must be run as quickly as possible. This makes it possible to find bugs early. As a result, the final product will be more accurate and bug-free when it is released. Only test suite automation will make all of this possible.

The benefits of test automation include:

• minimizes manual work when a test needs to be run repeatedly. This provides more time to conduct exhaustive manual tests.
• provides prompt feedback.
• tests can cover more test cases and be more accurate.
• helps to generate and compare the results of various tests to guarantee product consistency.
• builds quickly and fails quickly, adhering to the CI/CD pipeline's core principles.

Summary

Many organizations are asking how to transition into the world of continuous testing with core functional test automation while still maintaining manual test efforts as they struggle to adapt to the demands of continuous integration and testing. Building a solid standalone test automation suite that prioritizes critical tests, has low maintenance requirements, and effectively bundles them for unattended testing is the first step in accomplishing this. To manage the engineering and execution of automation within the current sprint, it is essential to enter a sprint automation cycle. Any meaningful and effective CI/CD pipeline is built on automation, which reduces manual work, provides prompt feedback, and allows for more thorough and accurate testing of more cases.

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