Top 27 Metrics to Measure in a Continuous Testing Process
Continuous testing is one of the key elements of DevOps approach. Basically, it involves automating the tests and running these automated tests early and often. While continuous testing is beneficial in so many ways, it can also be very challenging. In this article, we will delve into the 7 best practices that you should consider to help you successfully incorporate this testing procedure into your organization.
Continuous Testing: What Is It?
Simply put, continuous testing is the practice of applying automated tests early, gradually and adequately in the software delivery pipeline. Continuous testing uses automated tests to ensure teams receive immediate feedback to quickly mitigate as many risks as possible throughout the software development lifecycle. In other words, automated continuous testing helps eliminate the manual steps and turn them into automated routines.
7 Best Practices For Successful Continuous Testing Implementation
1. Adopt More Testing Automation
As mentioned above, continuous testing cannot be done without test automation. Automation increases the speed and errors coverage at which testing can function. Automating as much as you can in the development lifecycle will help you achieve faster releases.
2. Tracking Metrics
Use quantifiable metrics to keep track of your success or failure rate during testing. Continuous testing offers immediate results to see if the software is working as expected. Hard data yield results to measure progress and quality outputs. Tracking how many bugs are found and corrected provides continuous validation for your business value ROI. Two key metrics that you need to be sure to keep track of are the counts of defects and counts of fail/pass test scripts. Tracking the number of defects discovered in your testing process will help you determine if the number increases or decreases. And keeping track of the number of pass/fail test scripts will help you produce a comprehensive testing strategy to create better functionality for your application.
3. Keep Communication Transparent
Keep your communication lines transparent to prevent the testing pipeline from becoming siloed. Bottlenecks can form when communication between other teams or roles within the same team are not transparent, resulting in time wasted that could otherwise be spent more productively. It's like a well-choreographed dance. The steps have been set in place and you need to learn how to move fluidly with your partner to smoothly fulfill all the steps. Active communication is the key to achieving the balance necessary to effectively carry out continuous testing.
4. Integrate Performance Testing into Delivery Cycle
How do you know if your application is working to the best of its ability? Is it running optimally or is it crashing during heavy use? Performance testing is the answer to these questions. Performance testing is an integral part of continuous testing as it helps check the speed, responsiveness, and stability of your application. It's an investigative process that observes how the system is running and find solutions to overcome those observations.
After all, if you want to keep up the speed, maintain low effort to script, and create parallel executions with minimal interdependence, you should use tools to help you with these efforts!
5. Leverage Containerization
Containerization makes continuous testing easier to process by keeping each service of the application in its own environment. Imagine being able to test only the specific code that you need at one time, rather than the entire application. Also, using containers for your test environments keeps the often difficult-to-maintain environments up-to-date with the latest code changes that would be released to production. Furthermore, if the test suite fails or if the data ends up corrupted, the container can be discarded and another one set up with fresh data.
6. Tool Integration
Continuous testing is not just about automation. It involves teams using proper tools to make the testing process easier, faster, comprehensive, and more effective. Such as tools that work with the dev toolchains to remove the manual overhead (where possible). Additionally, tools that remove/reduce mundane operations for testers, enabling them to focus on what is important: testing.
7. Multi-layers Tests
Using a multi-layered approach to run tests ensures all areas within the development lifecycle are covered. From unit, integration (API), system (GUI), and database testing, complete automation must take multiple testing processes into consideration for thorough testing to be carried out. As software techniques become more complex (especially taking into consideration the next steps of microservices), having a multi-layer approach in place will help you keep the complexity from overwhelming proper test execution.
Conclusion
Continuous testing is a great way to ensure your product is released to the market at quality customers expect. If you incorporate these best practices before implementing continuous testing within your organization, you'll be off to a great start.
Pipeline (software) Testing Software development Implementation application teams Test suite Data (computing) Metric (unit)
Source: https://dzone.com/articles/7-best-practices-for-successful-continuous-testing
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