Deploy Automated Testing to Create Better Software

[article]
Summary:
Receiving feedback on your testing results should yield dividends in quality. And the sooner you get that feedback, the quicker you can start seeing improved and consistent quality and faster time to market. So the question becomes, why wait to jump on the automated testing bandwagon?

To be competitive in the age of agile and continuous delivery, enterprises must create robust applications that provide compelling and intuitive user experiences. To complicate matters even more, those applications must encapsulate the business goals of the organizations.

As test managers and development teams increasingly depend on automated testing as a crucial part of their development lifecycle, they also must contend with this reality—more tests to manage and more test results to interpret. New best practices are needed to manage test tools, interpret results, and ensure testing is a seamless part of the release process.

The key ingredient of these best practices is using tools that run automated tests in order to get vital feedback as quickly as possible. These testing tools must enable developers and operations people to manage and execute all the results of the automated tests.

Typically, multiple tools will be in play together—some for functionality, others for performance, still others for security, and so on. All results need to be analyzed and monitored in order to make efficient, real-time decisions that accelerate go-live positions.

The bottom-line imperatives for these testing tools are they must allow DevOps people to visualize and analyze all the test results, and they must integrate with various continuous integration tools.

Only by meshing tightly with continuous integration and delivery tools can testing provide insight to a variety of stakeholders, notably development managers, release managers, business managers, and, last but never least, developers. All these people need to be able to easily access snapshots of individual test results as well as drill-down information.

Key Benefits of Test Automation

To maximize the efficiencies of test automation, enterprises need to focus on the basics, and nothing is more basic than the first principle of the agile manifesto: “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through the early and continuous delivery of valuable software.” To me, that says it all. The customer is king, so the enterprise must keep the king happy with better, faster services.

Rather than optimizing code and development features, I believe it is more important to get new software into production as quickly as possible. To achieve that goal, enterprises must use automated and rigorous testing. That means all the steps in the software development process—from creation to deployment—should be automated.

Better software is one of the two main benefits of automated testing; the other is faster time to market. Instant feedback enables DevOps people to change and improve quality very quickly. The longer they wait for failure, the more costly it is. It’s important to fail fast, because then you have enough time to fix problems.

Moving from the Old Way of Testing to the New

Today, many enterprises employ some form of automated testing, but too often they still leave a lot of their testing (notably integration testing, regression testing, and user acceptance) until those last hectic moments when the entire team is sprinting to take an application from development to deployment. Some organizations even have a separate user acceptance testing phase in the sprint phase that inevitably delays deployment to production even more.

A better approach is to incorporate acceptance-driven testing into the very first stages of software development and to maintain it throughout the process.

Automated testing makes this objective a snap. DevOps and business people can simply specify the acceptance criteria they want, and technology will take care of the rest. The criteria can be spelled out in plain text and in directly executable code. The plain text will be interpreted by a tester, who will perform the test and write a test report.

When the business and development teams collaborate closely in this way, the development team can run automated tests from the start. This results in less wasteful interactions toward the end of the software cycle—as well as the benefit of doing ten comprehensive tests a day. Or why not twenty?

In many different ways, most enterprises have embarked or are embarking on this journey of automated testing of software. The trend is unstoppable.

The Future of Software Engineering

Automated testing of software development is crucial to the future of enterprises, for very solid reasons. Automation delivers accuracy, efficiency, and real-time feedback, virtually eliminates waste, and, ultimately, creates better software.

The more testing enterprises do, the better they will be able to determine whether a new deliverable is superior to what is currently running.

User Comments

2 comments
Brain Robert's picture

I agree that automated testing adds to both speed and coverage. However, in many cases, manual testing is needed because automation tools cannot capture human interaction aspects. For example, if you are building a mobile app, you want real users to test the app under real world conditions. You want to understand how the app performs when somebody in in a specific geography using a combination of network and device. You also want to know how users "feel" about the app, something the tools cannot capture. 

Many times, developers don't want to use the optimal mix of automation and manual testing due to lack of internal skills. In such cases, they can outsource to specialized testing companies like www.passbrains.com, www.99tests.com or www.qualitrix.com

April 30, 2016 - 2:58am
Pratik Patel's picture

Nice article related to Automated testing by Viktor. These days, as we see the great shift of technology towards the automation, software testing through automation is also considered as one of the most effective as well as trending methodology for the better software testing, resulting in better test coverage and test accuracy with better execution control. 

Various Test Automation tools like Selenium, TestingWhiz, TestComplete, etc. are some of the widely preferred tools for software testing through automation.

July 28, 2016 - 6:26am

About the author

CMCrossroads is a TechWell community.

Through conferences, training, consulting, and online resources, TechWell helps you develop and deliver great software every day.