Why Continuous Testing is Critical to Improvement in the Digital Age
For companies who’ve just started out, taking a continuous approach for software testing is easy. But for those who have been in the business for decades, the luxury of building a new quality process from the ground up is close to being non-existent. Such organizations need to address extremely complex systems and regulatory requirements while constantly driving efforts to enable quality and avoid disruption to business-critical operations. Realigning well-established quality processes with the unrelenting drive towards continuous testing is the only way to enable (and ensure) software quality. In the digital age, continuous testing:The Testing Strategy to Adopt for Continuous Digital Transformation Improvement
When it comes to testing in the digital age, testing just during the development process is not sufficient; testing has to be inculcated as a culture across the software development life cycle – before the development process, during development, and even after the product is developed. It must be continuous testing, from the beginning, and at every stage of development and must work in tandem with modern software development practices, so organizations can achieve the benefits of quality, speed, and cost-effectiveness – all together. Here’s how organizations can leverage continuous testing for digital transformation:Implement DevOps
Continuous testing in the digital age works best when equipped as part of a collaborative DevOps culture. DevOps, through improved collaboration between various teams, makes it easy for everyone to focus on relentless improvement in software quality through continuous everything. Using DevOps, organizations can not only meet the goal of faster releases and enhanced software quality.They can also strengthen their shift-left approach, so testing is done more frequently and across every stage of the development lifecycle. Through proactive, cross-functional communication at all levels of the company, DevOps bridges the gap that has traditionally existed among development, testing, security, and the rest of the business – while fundamentally changing how they code, test, and deliver software.
Enable Automation
To keep up with the speed of the market in a digital era, automation needs to be an integral aspect of continuous testing. Automating tasks across the testing process can not only reduce manual efforts, it can also help push tested software into production – far sooner.It can enhance the spectrum of continuous testing as well as improve test coverage. Through continuous automated feedback, teams can get insight into what truly works and what needs to be done better – to improve testing outcomes.
Embrace Cloud
Although continuous testing can help organizations improve the quality and speed with which products (and new features and changes) are introduced into the market, using cloud to improve access to on-demand testing resources can be transformative for dynamic delivery.Using cloud, teams can improve collaboration, get access to the highly available, secure, and scalable tools and resources they need while enabling data storage, retrieval, and interaction throughout the business. What’s more, with cloud, teams can also more easily meet quality assurance metrics and reduce the costs of on-premises infrastructure and in-house physical installations.