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Test Automation

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Test automation is also a key practise in DevOps. In the past, we were a little loose about what tests were required to be automated. We were a little loose about at what level we required the automation, and we were loose about measuring coverage. Let’s take a look. In a world where most tests are manual, you get these long regression tweets often done from the user interface end. Often, they take long to run, and often, they’re very brittle with changes to the underlying software. This gives you very slow feedback on quality. It gives you a lot of manual inspection of the test results.
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It gives you a lot of back and forth about what does this result mean, and the consequence of this long running process is that tests are often skipped. Longer and longer test cycles get planned, and repetitive test suites will get pushed to the least skilled testers. Or they’ll get outsourced, and you’ll end up with a paradox of boring repetitive work being done by humans instead of machines. On the other hand, if we think about what happens in a DevOps world with automated testing, you get fast feedback to all the stakeholders. You test at the lowest level as frequently as possible, deliver tests as part of code. This builds a confidence in application quality.
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It builds a confidence that the software is passing what you know to be the most important tests, because the test failures are breaking the build. That is a build does not proceed if the automated testing fails. And if tests are flaky, that is they do not produce consistent results, you fix them, just like you fix code. Tests need to be reliable. Quality is checked all the time. You use this to increase release frequency, so passing tests means you can push through the release pipeline automatically and get deployed. The release events, that is that process of going through the pipeline. That deployment becomes routine.
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And if something needs to be added to make the test suite more robust, because you discover something in live site, you improve the test suite. But passing tests has real meaning, and then new value to tests comes new automation. And that new automation helps to ensure that the right software is getting deployed. That quality is something that is enforced automatically through test automation.

The world has moved to rapid product release cycles. Gone are the days when product managers planned for a big release every three to four years.

Now developers are being asked to react swiftly to customer feedback and to release new features rapidly, often and against shorter release cycles. In this fast-moving environment, developers face the challenging task of continuously updating their software while still ensuring that their product meets a high-quality bar.

Key question developers face is this – how can I ensure a continuous release cadence while maintaining a high-quality bar? The answer lies in automated testing.

Automated testing helps developers run tests early and often to ensure that they are testing their software quality continuously and making sound decisions on whether to release their product or not. Test automation has various benefits, including but not limited to obtaining early feedback, shortening the release cycles, reducing cost, measuring quality continuously, avoiding regressions, shipping high-quality product,s and finally, making their customers happy.

It is important to note that test automation should be done in the right way and at the right time to ensure a high-quality release.

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