Software Testing in Continuous Delivery

Software testing is an organizational process in software development that verifies the correctness, quality, and performance of business-critical software. Software testing is used to ensure that intended business systems and product functionality are functioning as expected.

software testing company can be a manual process or an automated process.

• Manual software testing is led by a team or individual who will manually operate the software product and ensure that it operates as expected.

• Automated software testing consists of many different tools with different capabilities, from isolated code correctness checks to simulating a complete human-driven manual testing experience.

Benefits of software testing

Software testing will reduce software development company and maintenance costs, thereby saving time and money for organizations. Software testing provides stability guarantee for the development of new functions. Testing ensures that functionality works as expected and users don’t encounter errors.

New feature development time is reduced by specifying a set of test cases that new features must match to be considered complete and shippable. This gives developers a fixed target to work toward more accurate timeline estimates and reduce the introduction of new bugs. Once these test cases are in place, overall maintenance costs are reduced. Tests can be run against delivered functionality to ensure it still functions as expected.

Level of software testing

There are several basic levels of software testing, each examining software functionality from a unique perspective within the development process. We look at each type of test in turn and examine their practical uses.

Unit Test

The basic level of software testing is unit testing. Unit testing is the practice of checking input and output correctness of a single unit of code. In this case, the unit of measurement is an independent code function or method.

During unit testing, use mock input to execute production code functions in the test environment. The function’s output is then compared to the expected output for that input. If the output matches expectations, the test passes. If they don’t match, the test fails. Unit testing is a great way to verify functions that derive data.

Integration Testing

When a software test case covers multiple units, it is considered as an integration test. When developing software test cases, the boundary between unit tests can quickly evolve into integration tests. Often, unit tests may be developed that run against third-party code dependencies. The dependency itself does not need to be tested, the integration with the dependency will be mocked or faked.

Functional or end-to-end testing

Test cases that simulate a complete user-level experience are called functional testing or end-to-end testing. End-to-end testing uses tools that simulate real human user behavior. Common steps for end-to-end testing:

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End-to-end testing verifies the correctness of all layers of the software stack thanks to a full-experience execution environment.

Exploratory testing

Exploratory testing is a testing exercise in which a tester is assigned a loosely defined task to complete using the software being tested. This means you can learn a lot about the way people use your product in the wild. Exploratory testing sessions can even incentivize users by offering rewards for having the most issues, having the best bugs, or doing unexpected things with the product.

One of the benefits of exploratory software testing is that anyone can join in to help with testing because all they need to do is browse the product freely. Exploratory tests are not randomized, but they are also not scripted like manual tests.

Software testing in continuous delivery

Continuous delivery leverages all of the testing strategies mentioned previously to create a seamless pipeline that automates the delivery of completed code tasks. The optimal setup will allow developers to push recently completed code into the continuous delivery pipeline for evaluation. The pipeline will then run the newly pushed code through the test level. If the code passes the tests, it is automatically merged and deployed to production. However, if the code fails the tests, the code will be rejected and the developer will automatically be notified of the steps that need to be corrected.

Popular established software language development ecosystems have their own subset testing ecosystems. There are many tools that provide utilities to aid in testing and developing test suites. These tools are usually installed through a package manager specific to the programming language used in the project.

In addition to test instrumentation, tools for test execution and development are provided. Various test runners can be installed to provide output data from the test suite. A common practice is to measure “test coverage” across the entire project. Code coverage tools can be used to indicate how much of a code base has been adequately covered.

Once the test suite is developed and running properly on a local project, it can usually be integrated directly into the CD pipeline . Most hosted CD/CI systems will guide how to integrate test suites into the pipeline.

How to make testing part of the CD pipeline

A truly automated, value-added CD pipeline is built on a solid foundation of testing. This testing foundation starts with manual test cases and gradually evolves into automated solutions.

Emphasis on quality at every step of the pipeline

Everyone (developers, testers, etc.) is responsible for the quality relationship with the customer. Every line of code either makes the customer experience better or worse. The CD pipeline’s test suite is a multifaceted tool for developing high-quality and correct code. During the product design phase, test suites can be kept in mind to think ahead about how features will be developed. This test suite is primarily used to streamline the development process, but can also be executed in test and production environments for quality assurance.

Allow developers to demonstrate feature quality

Traditional testing approaches believe that testing is a separate process, out of sync with developers. Developer absence from quality assurance can lead to a lack of empathy for customers on the development team. Additionally, a lack of developer involvement in quality can cause problems to fester in the code base longer, increasing the cost of fixing them. This approach is also expensive in terms of organizational staff costs, as it encourages hiring a separate QA team to take on the responsibility.

Continuous delivery increases developer awareness and empathy for the end-user experience. Developers are tasked with providing test coverage for the features they develop and overseeing them from development to production. This allows developers to take responsibility and prove the quality of the feature.

Built-in customer feedback

Continuous delivery enables rapid deployment and updates of software projects. This allows customer feedback to be immediately incorporated into the next version. If a user reports a problem, you can consult the CD pipeline test suite to narrow down the possible problem vectors. Development and testing teams that respond quickly to customer feedback are more successful.

Develop a solid software testing strategy

When designing a software testing services strategy, it’s best to keep the overall product, user, and business strategy in mind. Consider which are the highest value test coverage goals.

Ideally, a software project will strive to achieve 100% test coverage, ensuring that the code is bug-free and works as expected. Unfortunately, in the real business world, this is not realistic due to timeline and budget constraints.

Different testing strategies should also be considered based on the type of software deliverable. If the software is a GUI-driven application, then high-level end-to-end testing will be very valuable. Headless UI free software projects will forego end-to-end testing and get high marks from unit testing.

The general overall strategy for GUI-based user applications is as follows.

1. End-to-end testing of all core user flows, login, registration, checkout, etc.

2. Unit testing of all data sensitive code functionality (e.g. currency trading tools)

3. Integration testing at any point of third-party integration to ensure data flows to the third party and all errors are propagated correctly

Improve your software testing with continuous delivery

Working toward a continuous delivery workflow has many business benefits. By committing to a CD workflow, the organizational costs of hiring and managing separate teams for quality assurance, release management, and test engineering positions can be significantly reduced.

Continuous delivery improves overall product quality levels compared to traditional QA testing workflows. CD testing encourages developers to take responsibility for the end-user experience and the quality of the features they roll out. CD provides a framework that makes it easier for companies to focus on and discuss release quality.

Implementing a strong software testing strategy is the foundation of continuous delivery, and automation is key to a successful continuous delivery pipeline.