In the age of rapid releases and continuous up-time for software applications, business organizations are starting to recognize that to stay competitive the process of developing and releasing software needs to change. The pace of releases has been greatly accelerated, and with this demand IT organizations need to move faster, and they need to have their software ready and perfect faster. Failure on the part of an organization’s software is a failure of the business itself.
Continuous testing helps in achieving this goal by being embedded as a fundamental and ongoing aspect of every activity through the application lifecycle, from requirements gathering through to production. Automated testing of the software occurs multiple times across the entire platform wherein the test cases are ever evolving, the documentation of the testing is detailed, and testing processes are automated at all points to ensure accuracy and efficiency.
As a practice of automated testing across all phases within the SDLC to uncover and fix bugs/ issues as soon as they are introduced, Continuous testing is an integrated pipeline that increasing number of organizations are implementing in order to get the best out of their software and meet their business goals. Continuous implementation of End-To-End tests that can evaluate the client user experience throughout the platform processes. The requirements for Continuous testing are that the environment is stable and valid test data exists for test iterations.
Compared to Legacy testing approaches, we can see Continuous testing provides clear advantages:
Continuous testing as a best practice approach allows for the delivery of software more efficiently while mitigating business risk. By automating tests throughout the software lifecycle, Continuous testing can help identify issues & avoid bottlenecks within the development process, and ensure a seamless experience for client user of the platform. Organizations adopting Continuous testing often realize the following advantages:
* Alignment of testing with business risk leads to optimization of test execution
* Reduce dependence on manual testing
* Introduction of service virtualization and test data management
* Greater emphasis placed on testing as part of the delivery pipeline
* Integration of functional testing into the Continuous Implementation & Continuous Delivery phases within a DevOps framework
* Accelerated release cycles
* Less issues experienced by client users
* Significant savings in both time and money
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