With the advent of Smartphones , the mobile application testing technique is exponentially increasing. This is because to be in pace with the dynamics of the Mobile App Industry, the QA teams are expected to develop technological solutions which are faster as well as qualitative. That’s the reason most of the IT organisations are working on high end technologies like Mobile DevOps and Continuous Integration. In such a fast paced development environment, software is developed in every stage of the development cycle. So we cannot leave testing for the end, hence continuous testing is implemented in the CI/CD pipeline to gain better efficiency. In this blog we will discuss how continuous testing is imperative for an efficient CI/CD pipeline. Before that let’s have an overview on Continuous Testing.
What is Continuous Testing ?
In continuous testing, software testing takes place during the entire development life cycle. From planning to the deployment and even further like monitoring of a software code, testing can be performed in all the stages of the software development cycle . The pictorial representation of continuous testing looks like a continuous loop like the DevOps, where on the left we have continuous integration and on the right we have continuous delivery and testing can be performed throughout the loop in each and every stage.
Shift Left
If we look at the figure for continuous testing, you will find the continuous loop for CI and CD. The CI part or the left part of the loop is referred to as Shift Left and the Right part of the loop is called Shift Right. In traditional testing methods, Shift Right used to gain more focus than Shift Left and usually testing used to take place after coding. But in continuous testing, Shift Left is dealt with more focus as 85% of the defects are found during the coding stage. So in shift left testing is done in parallel to coding. It is imperative to perform Automation testing during shift left for efficient results. Also we can save a lot of time and cost in performing testing in the earlier stages than the later stages. So these are some of the basic advantages of Shift left which is a part of continuous testing.
How does continuous testing helps in building a foundation for efficient CI/CD pipeline
In continuous integration the code is committed several times in a day. Hence the development takes place at a fast pace. After the code is committed, a build is prepared and is tested, hence testing also takes place in a fast paced environment. It is imperative to perform automation testing at this stage to enable testing at a good speed and not to break the chain of fast pace app development.
Now let us understand continuous testing implementation in a ci/cd pipeline with the help of continuous testing platform pCloudy
At the very first stage where the developer develops the code, a debugging test automation can be run in pCloudy before even committing the code to a common repository. Then after debugging the code, the build is prepared and passed to testing server, here again pCloudy can be used for unit testing, if it passed then again for Regression testing pCloudy can be used for test automation after this a manual testing process will happen in which again pCloudy can be utilised. After manual testing the build is deployed to the production server.So in all these intersections pCloudy was used for continuous testing i.e for automation as well as manual testing. So this example proves that for an efficient CI/CD pipeline we need to perform continuous testing and a robust and comprehensive platform like pCloudy would be the best recommendation.