Since the inception of mobile apps, the entire world has experienced huge digital transformation. The influence of mobile apps has transformed our lifestyles. It has made our lives much faster, convenient and most importantly unleashed the various boundaries between different nations through easy communication. Getting so much through a small smartphone is revolutionary for the entire globe and this journey is expected to be progressive year after year. So today’s customers are smart and savvy and expect quick results with excellent quality. For these reasons app centric organisations want to implement technological solutions like continuous testing which yield faster and qualitative results. So let’s discuss the best practices to implement continuous testing.
Adopt Automation Extensively
In continuous testing, testing is performed from the early stage of the development lifecycle like designing and planning to deploying and monitoring. So continuous testing is usually implemented in Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery environment. We know that in continuous integration the developers tend to commit the code several times in a day. This shows that the continuous integration process takes place at high speed. In order to implement continuous testing in such a fast environment we need to ensure strong automation otherwise the complete ci/cd pipeline gets disturbed. Automated test results provide quick feedback which makes detecting and testing defects easier. Automation also facilitates easy functioning of recurring test cycles required in complicated test suites like regression and integration testing and provides fast test results at each stage of the ci/cd pipeline. With automation testing you can easily perform testing frequently reducing the labor required in manual testing. Hence having a strong foundation of automation is imperative to implement continuous testing seamlessly.
Implement a Systematic CI/CD pipeline
Continuous testing works on the principle of testing faster and testing frequently and for faster testing a systematic ci/cd pipeline is important to implement. Continuous testing follows the complete process of continuous integration and continuous delivery i.e. testing takes place in the complete development lifecycle which progressively improves the quality of a software code in every iteration. Without a proper ci/cd pipeline we cannot achieve efficient results, hence a proper ci/cd pipeline is important and effective automation is required to drive the pipeline efficiently. To implement a proper ci/cd pipeline, all we require is a right set of continuous integration and continuous delivery tools. Jenkins is one of the most popular continuous integration tools. It consists of automation servers where developers can commit code frequently.It is an open source tool and also supports multiple plugins for integrating testing, developing and collaborative tools like Jira, Appium, Maven, Slack, Github etc.
Practice Healthy Collaboration
Continuous testing covers the entire DevOps loop, where testing, developing and operations teams work together. Many times it happens that the operations teams are held responsible for delay in delivery of a software product. Also, however good tools you assemble for continuous testing but at the end of the day extensive analysis and reporting which is carried out by different teams is all that works, and this requires healthy collaboration between them. There might be teams which are geographically miles apart, in such case we can use proper collaborative tools like Slack, Github, Jira etc which does not harm communication while remote working. Hence collaboration is a major part of continuous testing to work properly which should not be overlooked at any cost.
Conclusion
To fulfill the dynamic expectations of the customer and keep in pace with the highly competitive market of mobile applications , we need to implement technological solutions which are faster, qualitative and convenient. Continuous testing is one of the proven testing methods which increases the speed and quality of mobile application testing. pCloudy is a cloud based continuous testing platform which can be used for testing from anywhere and anytime. It is a comprehensive solution to increase the speed of your App Testing by enabling Continuous Testing. The quality of being comprehensive, highly scalable, multi platform support, convenient for remote working makes it the best Continuous testing platform.