Addressing the Common Challenges in Continuous Testing

To stay ahead of the competition, enterprises are embracing Agile and DevOps. In their rush to launch products faster than their competitors, they’ve shortened development and testing cycles, turning testing into the biggest bottleneck in software development. There’s no doubt that continuous testing is crucial for continuous delivery but making it a reality is the real challenge. In this article, we’ll explore the common hurdles enterprises face when implementing effective continuous testing and discuss practical ways to overcome them.

Continuous Testing, and CI/CD and DevOps: Key Drivers of Quality at Speed

Continuous testing is a vital approach in modern software development that incorporates testing at all stages of the process. Continuous testing is the process of running automated tests every time code is changed, delivering quick feedback as part of the software delivery pipeline. It was designed to assist developers quickly detect, notify, and resolve issues.  

Continuous integration (CI)

Continuous integration, a key component of DevOps testing, entails integrating code from many development teams into a single repository. This testing in DevOps automates test executions after code integration, allowing testers to find and correct issues quickly. Identifying flaws before to product introduction saves firms a lot of time, money, and effort.  

Continuous delivery (CD)

Continuous delivery is an important part of DevOps testing that allows for incremental product updates through minor, frequent modifications. This paradigm requires development teams to maintain deployable code versions at all stages of development, ensuring readiness for production deployment.

Together, these practices improve software quality, speed, and reliability.

Why Is Continuous Testing Turning From “Nice to Have” to “Absolute Mandatory”?

In a scenario when software release cycles are shrinking from years and months to weeks and days, testing practices also need to evolve to support CI/CD pipeline. So, enterprises need to transform their testing approaches to ensure that apps are operating as intended. Any break will cost you a loss of revenue and reputation. Continuous testing is all about testing early, often, & comprehensively. However, enterprises are struggling to implement it due to the reasons given below.

Inadequate test coverage – When you start with continuous testing, the very first problem that you might face is requirement gathering. In most cases, requirement gathering is still a manual process. It means that testers are still writing test cases based on guesses how customers interact with the application. It’s not only time-consuming but also erroneous. Often teams don't know what they need to test, and as a result, either test too much-wasting resources-or test too little, which exposes them to business risk.  

Test data management – Imagine a scenario in which you need to test an ecommerce app. To execute this, you need at least 3 sets of data i.e. personal data (incl. Name, Family name, etc.), address data (to deliver the goods) and payment data (credit card, PayPal token or bank account data or other). In most cases, QA teams do not have access to such sensitive information. Another scenario is that in which data is spread across multiple databases. So, it can be painful and time-consuming to extract data for continuous testing.

Lack of standard tool – In most cases, QA teams use different tools i.e. combination of open-source and commercial off-the-shelf products to validate the code. Often, these tools neither offer proper documentation nor contribute towards test script maintenance. Rather than supporting continuous testing, these tools add to the woes of the testing team. Often, these tools don’t support complete technology stack, making testers juggle from one tool to another wasting their time in less valuable tasks.

To mitigate these challenges, enterprises are implementing continuous testing methodologies and test automation is the right solution.  

What Enterprises Should Do to Successfully Implement Continuous Testing?

To successfully implement continuous testing, enterprises need to invest in right automation tools.  

How to choose the right tool for Continuous testing

• Evaluate tool capabilities - Choose a tool that offers features tailored to dynamic systems, ensuring compatibility and effective testing.  

• Scalability and flexibility - Select a tool that can scale with your system and adapt to evolving business needs.

Watch out for the Biggest Myths in ERP Test Automation

• Integration capabilities - Ensure the tool seamlessly integrates with ci cd pipeline, supporting smooth collaboration with other tools.

• Ease of use and training - Opt for a user-friendly and no code tool to minimize training efforts and facilitate efficient usage across your testing team.  

• Cross-browser and cross-device compatibility - Verify that the tool supports testing across various browsers and devices to ensure comprehensive coverage.

Read more: How to Compare Test Automation Tools

• Reporting and analytics features - Choose a tool with robust reporting and analytics capabilities to gain insights into test results and performance.  

• Security and compliance - Prioritize tools that adhere to security standards and compliance requirements to safeguard sensitive user data.

Opkey – The Continuous Testing Platform Designed for ERP Applications Opkey is the continuous testing platform for ERP applications designed keeping modern enterprises in mind. Powered by Artificial-Test-Intelligence engine, Opkey significantly accelerates test creation by 5x-8x compared to other test automation tools and makes test maintenance a breeze with its Self-Healing technology. With Opkey, agile teams now have a test automation platform to create reliable automation test scripts significantly faster and maintain those painlessly.  

• 30,000 + pre-built components and test cases across multiple applications.

• Largest ERP support in market across 12+ ERPs and 150+ technologies.