With great speed comes great responsibility: software testing now a continuous race

Source- zdnet.com

Continuous integration and continuous delivery is giving us software updates every day in many cases. A recent survey of 500 IT executives finds 58% of enterprises deploy a new build daily, and 26% at least hourly. That’s why Agile and DevOps are so important. With great speed comes great responsibility. A constant stream of software needs constant quality assurance. To make sure things are functioning as they should, organizations are turning to continuous testing.

That’s the takeaway from the survey, released by Capgemini and Sogeti, in collaboration with Broadcom. Continuous testing, the process of fast and efficient validation of software releases in agile developments through highly automated tests, is gaining ground in large enterprises, with close to one-third of IT executives (32%) stating that their IT departments had “fully embraced continuous testing.”

While it may seem obvious that continuous testing requires a great deal of automation, the study also found that automation was only being used to execute 24% of test cases, 24% of end-to-end business scenarios, and to generate 25% of the required test data. More than one-third (36%) said that most of their testing time is currently spent searching, managing, maintaining and generating test data.

Artificial intelligence to the rescue? AI can enable smart test orchestration. While it was not clear how deeply AI was employed in current continuous testing cycles, at least 28% of executives say the intent to introduce AI to manage the process. “With the addition of machine learning capabilities, systems will be able to automatically determine the tests that are required in the release and production cycles,” the survey’s authors explain.

Finally, another important piece of the continuous testing challenge is keeping the process as transparent as possible. Among the executives surveyed, 35% identified a “complete audit trail of testing activities” and a “consolidated test and release pipeline” as the most important test orchestration capabilities. Another 32% pointed to a need for a “single-place for cross-team collaboration” and “continuous delivery pipeline visibility.”

The Capgemini authors make the following recommendations to enable successful continuous testing:

• Creative visibility of quality processes by implementing customized QA dashboards across CI/CD pipelines.
• Set up automated testing cycles, to detect defects early in the lifecycle.
• Leverage AI and machine learning to optimize test cycles.
• Automate the self-provisioning of test data.