An Intro to Continuous Testing Strategy for Agile Teams

With a paradigm shift away from traditional waterfall models, speed and reliability are the new objectives for a continuous testing strategy in Agile teams. Implementing this strategy involves multi-layered approaches that incorporate all types and levels of testing. To successfully implement a robust continuous testing strategy, we must consider several factors.

Streamline test processes

Streamlining your test processes involves three critical criteria, which are

• Identifying business risk.
• Discovering and managing bottlenecks,
• Optimizing tests.

A significant component of continuous testing is to reduce business risk, which compromises both customer and enterprise risk. Customer risk involves knowing which application workflows are a priority for your customers and planning risk-based test coverage accordingly. Enterprise risk involves understanding the current market environments and your product's place in them. Should you focus more on being first to market or your product's durability? Accurately identifying your business risks will allow you to map your test requirements to these risks.

Bottlenecks have historically slowed down processes and impeded speed. Several bottlenecks may present themselves in the testing process, such as gaps in communication, test access and authority, and defects not addressed on time. The goal of continuous testing is to have seamlessly integrated workflows. As such, identifying the areas that hamper and delay your pipeline is crucial for smooth transitions that continuous testing relies on.

Optimizing tests is essentially ensuring you choose the correct tests with the necessary coverage with the fewest amount of test cases. This dynamic process adapts to different stages of the pipeline that is being built. Test optimization takes precedence over test automation as it saves time and provides accurate results that ensure quality and velocity throughout the continuous testing process.

Automation strategy through CI/CD

Test automation is the backbone of Agile methodologies and continuous testing. It eliminates human error, greatly improves efficiency, and saves time on mundane and repetitive testing tasks. It is imperative to have appropriate automation strategies throughout your delivery pipeline. Rather than automating everything, automation must enhance rather than impede your pipeline. This could involve customized tools and automation checkpoints throughout your pipeline, which continue into production and post-deployment, so defects are found before your customers find them. The aim is for automation to provide reliable and consistent test results, including test maintenance. An effective test automation strategy relies on a schedule of the appropriate automation tools to run at specific points along the delivery pipeline.

Shifting left

The shift left tenet of quality engineering states that testing should happen as early as possible in the development process. This principle focuses on preventing defects rather than finding them further along the pipeline. Fixing errors in later stages of development becomes a lot more time-consuming and expensive. Shifting testing left allows you to catch errors quickly and much earlier in your SDLC. Detecting errors early ensures that defects do not present themselves in final builds. Test design plays a crucial role as it is essential that your testing uncovers important data applicable in the smooth flow of your delivery pipeline.

Collaboration and responsibility

Continuous testing is as much a shift in mindset as it is a shift in processes. Your teams must work in unity with the common goal of the enterprise in mind rather than individual agendas. This shift has to be led from the top, emphasizing education and experience, so every team member is aware of their role in developing the software pipeline. All team members must take ownership to ensure quality. It is only through collaboration and the smooth integration of various divisions in your enterprise that continuous testing can occur seamlessly.

Defining personas and focusing on the end-user

Continuous testing has several different people who benefit from the tests. For example, developers who need to ensure their code doesn't break builds or operations teams that need to ensure code changes don't cause performance issues. Defining these various personas becomes imperative for a successful continuous testing strategy because it allows you to prioritize what types of tests are required. Whenever a CI/CD build fails, it is helpful to know which defined personas acted as stakeholders and which tests should be prioritized to mitigate risks and issues early on and during the delivery pipeline. Amongst the various stakeholders, the most important party should be your end-users. Speed and efficiency should not come at the cost of customer satisfaction, as that is the number one metric for the continued growth of your enterprise. Incorporating user feedback during your SDLC will help ensure that your quality is on par with customer expectations. It will also allow you to prioritize testing to reach your customers' quality standards.

Conclusion

Continuous testing is a proven method of ensuring successful builds with quality and velocity. Adopting these methodologies in your enterprise requires you to have a good strategy, without which continuous testing can become a wasted effort as it increases costs and delays your pipelines. There is no standard solution to continuous testing as every enterprise adopts these methodologies for context-specific applications. Before utilizing continuous testing in your enterprise, you must take the time to implement an effective strategy for its implementation. Meticulous strategizing can be a key differentiator to build a successful continuous testing process for your agile teams.