How to Effectively Build a Continuous Testing Strategy?

Introduction

As the demand to release quality software products in the short amount of time continues to accelerate, software companies have to adopt new approaches to avoid falling behind. And continuous testing is a breakthrough solution to accommodate that needs. However, it's not an easy task to incorporate continuous testing into your organization as it requires a strategic planning process and many changes would need to be put in place.

After thoroughly researching continuous testing and consulting industry experts, we’ve compiled the best practices that you should consider to help you effectively build a continuous testing strategy. We hope this helps you make the best decision for your software testing needs.

Best Practices to Implement Continuous Testing

1. Tracking Metrics

Use quantifiable metrics to keep track of your success or failure rate during testing. Continuous testing offers immediate results to see if the software is working as expected. Hard data yield results to measure progress and quality outputs. Tracking how many bugs are found and corrected provides continuous validation for your business value ROI.

Two key metrics that you need to be sure to keep track of are: counts of defects and counts of fail/pass test scripts. Tracking the number of defects discovered in your testing process will help you determine if the number increases or decreases. If it increases, strategize ways to change your development process; if it decreases, keep up the great work! Additionally, keeping track of the number of pass/fail test scripts will help you produce a comprehensive testing strategy to create better functionality for your application.

2. Adopt More Test Automation

While manual testing is laborious and time-intensive, automation gives time back to your engineers to actually fix the bugs found during testing. The best part about test automation is the quick feedback the team receives. Continuous testing allows early and often feedback so that changes can be made far before releasing features to the market. So, automating as much as you can in the development lifecycle will help you achieve faster releases.

3. Multi-layer Tests

Using a multi-layered approach to run tests ensures all areas within the development lifecycle are covered. From unit, integration (API), system (GUI), and database testing, complete automation must take multiple testing processes into consideration for thorough testing to be carried out. As software techniques become more complex (especially taking into consideration the next steps of microservices), having a multi-layer approach in place will help you keep the complexity from overwhelming proper test execution.

4. Save Time with Headless Execution

Headless execution is the part of automating user interface tests that don’t incorporate the head (i.e. no browser UI or GUI). Resulting in faster execution, this process reduces the number of unnecessary caches, cookies, or resources that are sifted through to obtain the results that matter: does the application run as expected.
So make sure to run a subset of your tests on a real browser before releasing to your customers.

5. Tool Integration

Continuous testing is not just about automation. It involves teams using proper tools to make the testing process easier, faster, comprehensive, and more effective. Such as tools that work with the dev toolchains to remove the manual overhead (where possible). Additionally, tools that remove/reduce mundane operations for testers, enabling them to focus on what is important: testing.

6. Keep Communication Transparent

Keep your communication lines transparent to prevent the testing pipeline from becoming siloed. Bottlenecks can form when communication between other teams or roles within the same team are not transparent, resulting in time wasted that could otherwise be spent more productively. It’s like a well-choreographed dance. The steps have been set in place and you need to learn how to move fluidly with your partner to smoothly fulfill all the steps. Active communication is the key to achieving the balance necessary to effectively carry out continuous testing.

Reference: https://www.katalon.com/resources-center/blog/continuous-testing-best-practices/