According to a study by Capgemini,
automated testing can reduce testing costs
by up to 50% and time-to-market by 40%.
Ever felt the frustration of a software project dragging on, bogged down by endless bug hunts and missed deadlines? It’s a common story, but imagine if you could slash your testing costs by up to half and accelerate your product’s journey to market by a remarkable 40%. This isn’t just a fantasy; it’s the proven reality of automated testing, backed by solid research from Capgemini.
Automated testing in software development involves using software tools to automate the repeated manual process of reviewing and validating a software product, traditionally done by humans. Nowadays, automated testing is a standard practice in modern agile and DevOps software projects right from the start. Yet, to grasp its true significance, it’s crucial to consider the hurdles encountered in software development prior to its widespread acceptance.
Read to know about how automated testing reduces defects and time to market, and the role of automated testing in Agile DevOps.
Before Testing Was Automated: The Manual Era
What did software testing look like before automation became widespread?
In the days before automated testing, the domain was largely dominated by manual efforts. Software companies typically maintained a dedicated, full-time Quality Assurance (QA) team. This team was the backbone of quality control, meticulously scrutinizing every aspect of the software.
What was the primary role of a manual QA team?
The core responsibility of these QA teams revolved around the creation and execution of “test cases.” Think of these as highly detailed, step-by-step checklists. Each test case was specifically designed to verify that a particular feature or function of the software behaved exactly as intended and met all specified requirements.
How were these manual tests actually performed?
Once a new update, feature, or change was integrated into the software project, the QA team would physically (and often repetitively) go through each of these meticulously crafted test cases. This involved manually interacting with the software – clicking buttons, entering data, navigating menus – to confirm functionality and identify any deviations from the expected behavior.
What happened after a manual test was completed?
After executing their tests, the QA team would diligently compile and report their findings. These results, including any identified bugs, glitches, or unexpected behaviors, were then communicated back to the engineering team. This feedback loop was crucial for the engineers to review the issues, diagnose the root causes, and develop the necessary fixes and further improvements to the software.
The Setback in Manual Testing
However, this manual testing process was slow, expensive, and error-prone. The manual execution of test cases demanded substantial time and resources, resulting in delays in the software development timeline and escalated costs. Additionally, human error was always a risk, as manual testing could overlook specific issues or fail to catch bugs effectively.
Post Automated Testing
How has automated testing fundamentally changed the game for QA teams?
Automated testing has truly revolutionized the landscape of quality assurance, delivering significant improvements in efficiency and test automation ROI. It shifts a crucial part of testing ownership directly to the engineering team. This integration allows for the development of test cases concurrently with regular feature development on the product roadmap, making the QA process inherently more agile and proactive.
What role do automated testing tools and CI/CD play in this new approach?
A key objective of modern automated testing is the seamless execution of these test cases by CI/CD automated testing tools (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery tools). Once developed, tests are run automatically, often after every code change. This drastically reduces the time and human resources traditionally required for comprehensive testing, freeing up valuable developer time.
How does automated testing impact the size and focus of QA teams?
Automated testing naturally promotes leaner and more strategic QA team sizes. By automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks, it streamlines testing processes and minimizes manual effort. This increased efficiency in test execution allows the QA team to pivot their focus towards more complex, sensitive, or critical features of the software, ensuring that high-impact issues are identified and addressed promptly.
Beyond efficiency, what other key benefits does automated testing offer?
The advantages extend far beyond just speed and cost savings. Automated testing significantly enhances quality by enabling robust cross-platform testing, ensuring the software performs flawlessly across various operating systems. It also facilitates multi-language testing, guaranteeing functionality in diverse linguistic environments. This comprehensive coverage is vital for global software products.
How does automated testing contribute to reducing defects and accelerating time to market, particularly in Agile and DevOps environments?
Automated testing’s role in Agile DevOps is pivotal for defect reduction and faster time-to-market. By integrating testing early and continuously into the development pipeline (thanks to CI/CD), defects are caught much earlier when they are cheaper and easier to fix. The rapid feedback loop provided by automated tests allows teams to iterate quickly and confidently. This proactive approach, combined with the comprehensive and consistent validation, leads to a significant reduction in shipped defects and dramatically shortens the release cycles, getting products to users much faster.
What’s the overall takeaway regarding automated testing in modern software development?
In essence, automated testing has become indispensable in contemporary software development. It consistently delivers reliable test results, provides significant gains in overall team efficiency, and ultimately boosts the ROI for QA teams, solidifying its place as a critical component for success.
Types of Automated Testing
Unit testing: Unit testing focuses on testing individual units or components of a software application in isolation, ensuring each unit functions correctly per its design.
Example: In a CI/CD pipeline, changes to the shopping cart function prompt the pipeline to run tests to verify the correct calculation of the total price.
Integration testing: Integration testing verifies the interaction between different modules or components of a software system to ensure that they work together seamlessly.
Example: Ensuring that data flows correctly between a web application’s frontend and backend components when a user submits a form.
Functional testing: Functional testing evaluates the functionality of a software application by testing its features against the specified requirements to ensure they meet the desired outcomes.
Example: Verifying that clicking on a “Submit Order” button in an e-commerce application adds the selected items to the user’s shopping cart.
Regression testing: Regression testing is the most commonly automated process. It is performed to ensure that recent code changes have not adversely affected existing functionalities. It helps in maintaining software quality and stability over time.
Example: Checking that a software update to a mobile app does not cause previously working features, such as login or search, to malfunction.
Performance testing: Performance testing evaluates the responsiveness, speed, and overall performance of a software application under various conditions, helping to identify and eliminate performance bottlenecks.
Example: Simulating a large number of users accessing a website simultaneously to measure its response time and identify potential performance issues.
Considerations for Manual Software Testing in an Automated Testing Era
When deciding which software tests to perform manually, it’s essential to consider factors like the nature of the testing required and the ROI of automation.
Tests like exploratory testing, which relies on human creativity to uncover bugs in unscripted ways, can be more efficiently executed manually, as current automated tools for exploratory testing still need to be fully mature.
Similarly, visual regression testing, which detects visual design flaws in a software UI, often benefits from human observation due to the cost and limited adoption of automated tools in this area.
Building a test automation framework can require out-of-the-box thinking, considering factors like release frequency, available tools, and product market fit. Not all projects may benefit from automated testing; in some cases, a manual approach may be more effective, as there are no predefined steps.
Manual testing is necessary for scenarios where testing is required infrequently, such as validating color schemes in a user interface.
The Strategy of the Shift-Left Approach
The shift-left approach in software development refers to the practice of integrating testing earlier in the software development lifecycle, typically starting at the requirements or design phase. This helps in identifying and fixing defects as early as possible rather than waiting until later stages of development or during post-release.
Relevance of the Shift-Left Approach
Early Issue Identification: By testing earlier in the development process, issues and defects can be identified and taken care of before they escalate into more complex and costly issues to resolve.
Cost and Time Savings: Fixing defects early in development is generally less expensive and time-consuming than fixing them later. This can result in significant cost savings and shorter development cycles.
Improved Quality: By catching and fixing issues early, the overall quality of the software is improved, leading to a better user experience and higher customer satisfaction.
Better Collaboration: The shift-left approach encourages collaboration between developers, testers, and other stakeholders early in the development process, leading to a more cohesive and efficient development process.
Continuous Feedback: Testing early and often provides constant feedback to developers, allowing them to make informed decisions and improvements throughout the development lifecycle.
Alignment with Agile and DevOps Practices: The shift-left approach aligns well with agile and DevOps practices, emphasizing iterative development and continuous testing and integration.
The Role of Automated Testing in Software Product Development for Continuous Delivery
Continuous Delivery (CD) stands out as a crucial methodology aimed at swiftly delivering new code releases to customers. At the core of this methodology lies automated testing, a critical component ensuring the delivery process’s efficiency and reliability.
Another Approach: Shift-Right Testing
Shift-right testing is a forward-thinking approach that complements traditional shift-left methodologies. It emphasizes testing in production or after deployment to gather real-world feedback and enhance test coverage. This approach acknowledges the dynamic nature of software development and aims to improve software products’ overall quality and reliability.
Shift-Center Approach
Source: DevOps
Development teams prioritize time to market, while application security (AppSec) teams focus on ensuring secure software. This creates a balancing act, as security testing (AST) can only delay deployment, risking prioritizing time over security. The concept of “shift left” emerged as a response to organizations waiting to perform security testing until the end of development, causing delays. However, in the iterative and continuous nature of DevOps, which is more like a figure-8 infinity loop, there is no clear “left” or “right.” Instead, embedding software security solutions throughout DevOps, or “shifting center,” is a more practical approach to ensure security without sacrificing speed.
Integration of Continuous Delivery and Automated Testing
The CD is not a standalone process but rather part of a broader deployment pipeline. It is closely intertwined with Continuous Integration (CI), which precedes it. CI’s primary responsibility is to execute automated tests against any new code changes, ensuring that these changes do not disrupt existing features or introduce new bugs. Once CI successfully completes the automated test case, the CD process is triggered.
Benefits of Automated Testing in Continuous Delivery
Embracing automated testing has revolutionized the development process, enabling rapid, reliable, and scalable testing. Implementing automated testing frameworks has significantly reduced manual efforts, improved test coverage, and accelerated release cycles. The relationship between automated testing, CI, and CD yields numerous benefits for high-velocity software teams. Automated testing thus plays a pivotal role in maintaining quality throughout the development cycle. It ensures that new commits do not introduce any bugs, therefore keeping the software deployment-ready at all times.
Embracing the Future: Trends and Technologies in Automated Testing with CI Global
The future of automated testing is exciting, with advancements like AI, shift-right testing, containerization, low-code/no-code tools, and API testing reshaping the journey. Implementing Docker has transformed deployment practices, ensuring uniformity across various stages like development, testing, and production. Through containerization, improved resource utilization, scalability, and adaptability have been achieved, simplifying infrastructure management. Embracing Kubernetes for orchestration has optimized the management of containerized applications, enhancing scalability and resilience.
To stay ahead, connect with us to understand the complete testing cycle and determine which parts to automate, ensuring your testing practices align with changing market requirements and technological trends.
