Feedback is an essential aspect of software development — and not just any feedback, but timely feedback.
Imagine working on a payment processing app, and an expert test engineer spots a critical mistake in your code. In the input function for customer payments, a specific format for credit card expiration dates is expected, but the app doesn’t define the format. As a result, users input it in different ways. You fix the issue immediately, avoiding a bug that could have caused major headaches down the line.
Had the same bug gone unnoticed for months, fixing it would’ve been frustratingly hard, if not impossible. Worse, it could lead to production failures, angry users, and tense conversations between developers, testers, managers, and clients.
That’s why continuous testing is a must.
What is continuous testing?
Continuous testing involves testing your website or mobile app at every stage of the software development lifecycle (SDLC) so you can identify and resolve defects earlier than traditional testing methods.
For example, if you're building an e-commerce mobile app, you can integrate automated test suites into your continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline. These pre-written test cases help validate that key functionalities work as expected.
Tools like Jenkins or GitLab CI automate code integration and deployment, while Selenium can perform functional tests on critical features such as user registration, login, search functionality, and product filtering.
To ensure reliability, you design test cases for each feature, specifying expected outcomes for valid and invalid inputs. A test framework like Cypress can then execute these test cases automatically. Once integrated into the CI pipeline, tests run alongside the build process, providing rapid feedback on code quality.
By detecting bugs early, continuous testing improves code quality, shortens the lifespan of defects, reduces debugging costs, and accelerates product delivery.
How does continuous testing differ from traditional testing?
Continuous testing involves testing all throughout the SDLC, as opposed to traditional testing, which reserves testing for a dedicated stage. While continuous testing can involve both manual and automated tests, it works particularly well with automated tests that enable rapid feedback loops.
Receiving feedback continuously — rather than only during certain stages of development — can support more efficient work and an accelerated time-to-market. When you incorporate testing into all phases of development, you optimize the validation process to become more efficient, which in turn leads to identifying and resolving bugs faster. In traditional testing, late-stage errors can take a lot of time to fix, making it difficult to meet deadlines and deliver consistent quality.
Continuous testing heavily promotes automation. It is a philosophy of executing tests at every stage, and automation, or automated testing, is the means of writing predefined test scripts to execute those tests. In traditional testing, testers use both manual testing and automated testing, with the emphasis being more on the manual work. Keep in mind that automated tests are performed later in traditional testing, which can lead to different outcomes than the same tests being performed in continuous testing.
Who is involved in continuous testing?
Continuous testing is a group effort. It involves collaboration between several people.
- Developers write and maintain the overall codebase. In continuous testing, they integrate automated tests into their development process.
- QA engineers/testers design the test cases and write the code for automated tests. Sometimes, these are shared between QA teams and development teams.
- DevOps engineers are responsible for the infrastructure required to perform continuous testing. They ensure the CI/CD pipeline and testing frameworks work as expected for developers and testers.
- Managers oversee the entire SDLC, which includes continuous testing efforts. They make testing decisions and coordinate efforts between developers, testers, and DevOps engineers.
A step-by-step process of continuous testing
Define testing objectives
Meet with your developers and testers to define testing objectives for each stage of the SDLC. This can include the types of tests (e.g., smoke tests) and setting quality criteria. These objectives can vary from project to project. For instance, your objective might be to find bugs earlier, improve test coverage, or get immediate feedback for test results.
Select different tools for different stages
Different phases of SDLC require different tools. For instance, if you work with Java, you can use JUnit for unit testing. DevOps engineers might use CI/CD tools like Jenkins or GitHub Actions, as well as GitHub, to manage source code. Other popular tools include Docker for configuring test environments, Selenium for test automation, Ansible for deployment, and test management tools for managing the test suite.
Integrate test automation in CI/CD pipelines
CI/CD is a set of practices that deliver code changes automatically to a shared repository and automate their deployment to the production environment. You can use testing tools and scripts to perform automated tests with this code so you can get feedback on bugs simultaneously. The workflow is very simple.
- Choose a testing tool like JUnit.
- Define test cases for different tests like functional or integration tests. These tests are then converted into code in the form of scripts.
- Configure the CI/CD pipeline to automatically execute these tests as soon as your developer commits the code.
- Get instant feedback on how your code works and fix it (if needed).
4. Introduce quality checks
You need to introduce quality checks at different phases of development. This can be done through static code analysis, code reviews between developers, or sticking to specific coding standards.
Some examples of various checks include:
- Test pass rate: Ensure 90% of automated tests pass successfully. This can improve software quality by expanding test coverage to identify bugs.
- Compliance standard: Ensure that code changes adhere to compliance for industries with strict regulations, such as HIPAA in healthcare. This can help avoid legal challenges.
- Performance benchmark: Set a minimum response time period for complex features. This can help prevent laggy responses and improve user experience.
5. Develop a feedback loop
A feedback loop is the systematic way to collect testing feedback from SDLC and then act on that information to improve your testing. Here’s how it looks:
- Developers write code, which goes through automated tests.
- Testers analyze test results in a test management platform to identify any bugs or areas of improvement. They might use a bug-tracking tool like Jira to document, track, and assign these bugs.
- Developers fix the code after getting feedback and deploy the code via Ansible.
- Testers track and verify the successful outcome.
A good feedback loop improves software quality, team collaboration, and boosts time-to-market.
6. Configure a staging environment
A staging environment is a copy of your application that you can test before it goes live. It allows development teams to fix errors in a mock environment where they can push new updates or changes to see if something breaks. The staging environment mirrors the production environment so it can be used for realistic test scenarios.
For example, you can use a staging environment to mimic the traffic an ecommerce website might receive on Black Friday. By simulating a large amount of traffic in a staging environment, you can assess how much load your main functionalities like shopping cart, check out, payment processing, and inventory management can handle. This analysis allows you to identify and resolve any issues that a surge in traffic could cause, preventing issues in production when the site gets hit with abnormally high traffic.
Tools like AWS and Azure can help you to create a cloud-based staging environment. Some CMSs also have built-in tools or plugins to create a staging environment.
7. Create reports and document everything
Use testing tools to create in-depth testing reports and document everything about tests, including objectives, scope, test cases, test types, quality checks, defect logs, and other key testing details. There are two benefits of documentation. First, teams can evaluate the testing process and optimize it regularly by identifying common issues. Second, it helps team members collaborate better as they can track tests easily.
Continuous testing methodologies
Continuous testing methodologies are a set of established testing practices that can help you to adopt continuous testing.
Shift-left testing
Shift-left testing integrates testing early in the software development lifecycle to identify errors earlier, saving resources. For example, if you use Python, you can use a static code analysis tool like Pylint to enforce a coding standard and analyze code for potential errors.
Shift-right testing
Shift-right testing is performance testing in the production environment to track and optimize user experience and system performance. Netflix is popular for doing this in the guise of chaos testing, where their team intentionally introduces bugs in the system to test them in real time.
Functional testing
Functional testing assesses your website/app functionalities against set requirements to ensure they work exactly like the client wants. For instance, if you are working on an ecommerce website, you need to perform a functional test to see if the checkout functionality is working, i.e., users can add their delivery address, payment details, and other information to place an order successfully.
Smoke testing
Smoke testing involves conducting preliminary tests to see if basic functionalities work before you go for more in-depth testing. For instance, you can use a smoke test to see if your user can add a product to the shopping cart and adjust its quantity/amount accordingly. It’s a very basic functionality, but validating it can help you to advance to more detailed testing of your shopping cart management.
Regression testing
Regression testing is re-running tests to verify if the latest code changes impacted the existing functionality. For instance, if you add a new feature — such as “you might also like…” suggestions — regression testing would ensure that the new feature doesn’t break any existing functionality.
Unit testing
Unit testing tests individual functions or modules to see if they work independently or separately. For instance, when you add items to the shopping cart, you must test whether your total price calculation is done correctly. For this, you need to test many “units” or small functions like retrieving the right price information, discounts, taxes, and the actual calculation that happens in real time.
Integration testing
Integration testing tests a group of functions or modules to see if they work together. Consider our last example of total price calculation. When you test all the small functions and then test them simultaneously to see if the total price is calculated correctly, then it’s integration testing.
Benefits of continuous testing
Continuous testing helps cut defect costs, provide extensive test coverage, and maintain consistent quality.
Reduces defect costs
According to IBM Systems Sciences Institute, you have to spend six times more on a defect discovered during implementation than a bug found during the design phase. Continuous testing helps find and resolve defects faster, saving on costs as a result.
Provides wider test coverage
Continuous testing improves test coverage by enabling automated tests. Automated tests cover more types of edge cases and testing scenarios that sometimes fall through the cracks with traditional testing.
Automating repetitive tasks also means that you can execute more tests across different configurations (e.g., different OS like Linux or Mac) and environments.
Maintains consistent quality
Continuous testing helps maintain consistent quality for your app or website. When you run automated tests regularly, they check your app or website against each of its versions. This workflow enforces a standard of uniform and stable quality that’s harder to achieve with traditional testing. Traditional testing relies more on human interpretation, so factors like fatigue or human oversight affect consistency in testing.
Challenges of continuous testing
Continuous testing can get tricky when you have to handle a higher volume of tests, struggle with the availability of a test environment, or choose the wrong tool for your needs.
Maintenance of a high number of tests
Testing all throughout the SDLC sounds straightforward. However, as your application expands in size, you’ll have to add more and more tests. Maintaining the increasing number of tests can be difficult, especially if you work with distributed systems.
Availability of test environment
You need proper access to well-designed test environments to implement continuous testing. Some external services might face downtime or internal issues that can delay your testing process. Some services also have restricted access or usage policies. i.e., what user can use what resource, under what conditions, and for what amount of time. For instance, some testing tools can only offer role-based access control for Jira roles.
Incompatible tool choice
Sometimes, team members go for the most popular tool, which isn’t necessarily the best option for their workflow or system. For example, you might pick a popular testing tool only to find out it only allows 100-200 requests per minute with HTTP API. This is a common limitation with testing tools that can limit your efforts. Something like Qase can offer you more than 3 times requests per minute (600 requests per minute) with REST API.
A test management platform can help you implement continuous testing and fix your bugs more efficiently
Continuous testing has become an integral part of modern software testing. While introducing it to your workflow, you need the best tools to make your testing seamless and efficient. For this purpose, you need a test management platform.
A test management platform is a comprehensive tool that can help you plan, organize, execute, and track continuous testing efforts. You can use it to streamline executing automated tests, get real-time feedback on test results, improve collaboration among stakeholders, and get detailed tracking and reporting insights to fix testing bottlenecks.
