It seems that continuous testing got a bit lost in the IT zeitgeist. And it really shouldn’t have.
In 2023, around 70% of businesses used Agile in their SDLCs. While the adoption of continuous testing (CT) was hovering at around 50%. Consider that companies implementing these techniques operate with varying levels of maturity, and the previous numbers get smaller. Overall, continuous testing is lagging behind.
So, in this article, we’ll discuss why it shouldn’t.
Immediate Feedback
Continuous testing doesn’t really have a dedicated time slot. In the prevalent testing processes, QA teams need to wait for a round of development to finish. Then, they can test it and approve the section or start again.
With continuous testing, QA is nearly always active. Devs don’t have to supply a build. And QA specialists work with smaller portions of code as soon as they’re ready. This means that your team can get feedback on quality much faster.
The shrunk feedback loop allows developers to correct problems at the point of introduction. So, you’re very unlikely to come across defects in later SDLC stages. And since CT can continue even after you go live, you’ll never see a bunch of issues that accumulated during previous testing phases.
Exposing Risks Early
With such quick feedback, you can also locate issues (extra) early on. In CT, automated tests run every time code is committed to the repository. And because you’re working with smaller code pieces, the tests themselves run faster, immediately alerting you to any bugs.
Risk-based feedback further enhances this process by prioritizing critical or error-prone areas. In continuous testing, different parts of the app are assigned risk levels based on factors such as:
- Importance to the system.
- Complexity.
- History of defects.
When a high-risk area fails a test, the feedback provided is prioritized, allowing the development team to address the most critical issues first.
Over 60% of businesses use automation to improve quality. That’s why early risk exposure is among the top advantages of continuous testing. And 43% of companies employing automated software testing services have seen advanced test accuracy, agility, and coverage.
Proactive Issue Resolution
With speedier testing and defect detection, you also get one of a bit underrated benefits of continuous testing – proactivity. Let’s take a look at an example to understand how it works.
Assume you want to start testing when more stuff is ready. So, your developers have more time to work with the code, and your QA team can check everything at once at, say, the system testing phase.
- You find an issue and need to find the root cause.
- You go down a layer to check the integrations. But your defect isn’t here.
- Then, you go down again to the full build (a module). You spend time and money here but ultimately find no problems.
- Last, you go even deeper and finally locate the mistake – one mishap at the unit level.
With continuous testing, such a scenario is impossible. Testing begins right after the tiniest bit of functional code is available. You work your way up from small operations to combined, integrated ones. In other words, instead of checking a big chunk of software, you examine its pieces before looking at how they all work together. You fix issues before they accumulate or turn into critical defects.
Better Team Collaboration
The benefits of continuous testing in agile are far-reaching. Their effect can even be felt in your team’s work. And that’s something far too many overlook.
Nearly 90% of executives and employees believe that poor collaboration is the main source of project failures. A team of insanely talented specialists who can’t cooperate will do only half as good. The true value of a team is that everyone can contribute their knowledge, skills, and perspectives.
In a way, continuous testing forces your experts to work together more closely. But it’s not the authoritarian kind of pressure. It’s the one that says, “If you don’t find a way to cooperate, none of this will work.”
CT doesn’t recognize fixed responsibilities. For instance, there’s no mentality that QA decides how good a developer’s code is. Nor do developers tell QA agents how to test their code since they know it better.
- Continuous testing unites your team with a common goal – delivering a high-quality product.
- With speedy feedback, there’s minimal waiting time, no waiting and guessing. The communication is transparent and shared across the team.
- When an issue does arise, CT allows for an immediate collaboration between your crew to address it.
- And with shorter SDLCs, another reason why continuous testing is important, your specialists have more to innovate and experiment, refining your project.
We’re not even halfway done with continuous testing benefits. Yet, we can say right now that enhanced collaboration is arguably the most significant. To make CT work, you need to assemble a crew or hire QA engineers who know how to make it work. People and their skills guarantee your success. So, do take their selection seriously.
Better Test Coverage
Test coverage determines how much of your code a test suite covers. Yet, getting decent coverage doesn’t always mean having lots of tests.
Say you have three lines of code. There are two options for you:
- Write three tests to handle this code.
- Write a more intricate, single test that executes all three lines.
The second variant is much more effective: takes less resources and time. Continuous testing allows for this option because developers and QA engineers work together from the start. QA teams can get to know the project better and design refined scripts. And devs can get feedback from them much faster.
There are a few more traits of continuous testing that let you achieve ampler coverage:
- In CT, you run tests more frequently, thus exercising more code.
- Automated tests can cover a wider range of scenarios and edge cases.
- Parallel testing accelerates test execution.
Plus, if you use one of the continuous testing best practices – test case optimization – you can enhance your tests’ effectiveness even further.
Better Testing Process
Combining the advantages of continuous testing gets you another perk – a more productive testing process. Here’s how it works:
- Close team collaboration. QA engineers and developers can exchange information and knowledge to design precise solutions.
- Fast feedback. There’s no waiting or delays. Everyone gets immediate feedback, which allows your team to quickly deal with issues.
- Frequent test execution. Lots of tests that run systematically and at every stage of the development lead to better coverage and quality.
43% of companies identify “higher test accuracy” as one of the top benefits of continuous testing. And when asked, “What are the benefits of continuous integration in testing,” over 60% of respondents defined “improved quality” as the most significant advantage.
So, CT is not a mix of little improvements here and there. It can help you substantially enhance your teams’ performance and upgrade product quality.
Continuous Improvement
The nature of CT pushes flexibility. For example, with continuous testing, you rely on recurring iterations. And there’s no way for those iterations not to bring progress. Well, stagnant CT is possible if you’re not using best practices in continuous testing or work with subpar QA services.
Yet, overall, if you’re not sequentially improving, you’re doing something wrong, and it might be time to reconsider your software QA services and approach to CT.
Here are some of the cause-effect relationships between continuous testing and continuous improvement. You can also use these to map out where your testing process is lacking if the rate of advancement doesn’t match your vision.
- CT allows for real-time feedback, thus instant insights and improvements.
- Quick issue resolution prevents defect accumulation and lets you see where bugs are more common, enabling data-driven decisions and refinements.
- Continuous testing promotes frequent internations. With each of them, you enhance your product, multiplying the app’s quality score.
- With better collaboration come stacked skills and experience. This makes your team use their combined knowledge to advance the project.
- CT reduces your reliance on manual testing services, which are indispensable for many scenarios but rather time-consuming. Automation unloads your crew and allows them to use this time for strategic thinking, value-adding tasks, and innovation.
All in all, continuous testing provides you with an environment for continuous improvement. And its integral traits, like automation, collaboration, and integration, let you build a culture that puts quality at the center of your project.
Reduced Technical Debt
On average, organizations can spend up to 42% of their development time on dealing with technical debt. That’s over two days in a working week wasted on solving issues that could’ve been avoided.
Technical debt is prompted by taking shortcuts to reach short-term goals, like rushing development while compromising quality to meet deadlines. Earlier we’ve mentioned a few of the continuous integration testing best practices: proactive issue resolution and frequent iterations. These, even on their own, can help reduce technical debt significantly.
But you shouldn’t rely on these two perks only. You’d be missing out on a lot.
- You test your app early. Thus, every next testing phase has fewer defects. And upon its release, it’s practically bug-free.
- You test often. So, even if an issue pops up, you can fix it quickly before it gets buried under heaps of code or caught by a user.
- You automate a bigger portion of your tests (40-85% of tests is ideal). Hence, you cover more ground, and your team has more time to improve your product in different ways.
- You implement continuous testing best practices such as ongoing refactoring, TDD, detailed documentation, etc. All of these help you write more accurate scripts, maintain a cleaner code base, and streamline collaboration.
- With the above practices, you accelerate your SDLC, which leaves you with more time to refine your app.
It all sounds magnificent. Yet, let’s not get carried away. The above benefits of continuous testing don’t happen on their own. Implementing CT doesn’t mean that you’ll automatically obtain these advantages. You need to organize continuous testing right, assemble an expert team, and build a culture that supports your CT goals.
And as of now, the biggest roadblock to maximizing continuous testing is the lack of skills. That’s likely the reason behind companies not adopting CT as fast as, say, automation on its own. So, before you decide to jump in and use CT for all the promised treasures, find people who can make it happen.
Easier Scalability
The importance of continuous testing goes beyond supercharging the tech side of development. It also helps you take a confident step into the future.
- By frequently testing the software under various conditions, you can identify performance bottlenecks swiftly. This allows for proactive system optimization and scaling to handle increased workloads.
- CT encourages developers to write clean, efficient, and maintainable code, which is much easier to maintain.
- You can use the data generated by CT to inform decisions about scaling the system, ensuring that resources are allocated properly.
Continuous testing allows you to always know what’s going on in your app and what it’s in. So you can make smarter choices regarding scalability. Plus, since CT holds your app’s quality at a higher level, the scalability process itself becomes simpler since you’re working with a stable, neat base.
Consistent Quality
Speaking of app quality, with CT, you can be certain that your project won’t experience a sudden dip in excellence. There can always be some mishaps. Some issues may occur for various reasons, internal or external. But, overall, continuous testing helps you maintain and gradually refine your product’s value.
Over 70% of companies agree that iterative models, including continuous testing, help them with:
- Keeping the team more stable and organized (better collaboration).
- Advancing the release of functionalities and features (better processes).
- Improving testing quality (better app quality).
Continuous testing helps maintain consistent quality across different releases and builds. When you run tests frequently, you locate defects early, and they don’t impact the final product. Automated tests contribute to this by checking every version of your app in the same way. In other words, all software pieces are regularly subjected to coherent assessments, securing uniform quality.
If you use continuous testing best practices like running tests in the same environment and managing test data consistently, you reduce result variability. Basically, you eliminate the possibility of the same test producing different outcomes.
This can happen with changing conditions. CT lets you make sure that issues are due to the software itself, not due to differences in how or where the tests were run. So you get a more accurate representation of your app’s quality.
Plus, since continuous testing generates more data, you have better info that you can use for decision-making, defect prediction, and proactive adaptation.
Faster Time-to-Market
We’ve covered a lot of advantages of continuous testing so far. And you probably already understand how it speeds up time-to-market. So, let’s recap the key points briefly:
- The core component of CT, automated testing, is much faster than manual testing.
- Continuous testing runs tests automatically and frequently with every code change or build.
- Any issues are addressed right away rather than being discovered later in the process when they’re more difficult to fix.
- Because problems are caught early, they can be resolved quickly, preventing rework.
- CT’s immediate feedback allows developers to make adjustments and improvements on the fly instead of waiting for a test phase to finish.
And don’t forget about another aspect that adds to continuous testing’s importance – collaboration. Teams are encouraged to communicate and exchange ideas. So, there are no holdbacks or waiting to say something until it’s one’s turn.
With CT, your QA engineers and developers should fire like healthy neurons, constantly exchanging data. Whenever someone has a vision on how to fix or improve something, it’s instantly put out there.
So, not only is your app delivered faster, but it also never compromises quality.
Cost Reduction
A long time ago, the Systems Sciences Institute at IBM published a study that demonstrated how late bug fixing increases development costs:
- An issue that was caught and amended in the design phase amounts to $100.
- If it’s located in the testing phase, it’ll cost $1,500.
- And if it’s found in production, the price skyrockets to $10,000.
Granted, these numbers are quite dated. Plus, they related to more traditional approaches to software development. But the sentiment still holds true. Resolving an issue further down the road is more expensive and taxing:
- The longer a bug goes undetected, the more intertwined it becomes with the rest of the code. This makes it more difficult to isolate and fix without introducing new problems.
- Bugs can have cascading effects, impacting other parts of the system and requiring extensive changes.
- Fixing a bug late in the process often involves significant rework, such as modifying existing features or redesigning parts of the system.
- Bugs can delay the release of the software, leading to missed opportunities and increased costs.
- Issues that reach production can negatively impact customer satisfaction and damage the reputation of the software.
With CT, you’re not just saving money. Over 60% of companies noted more positive ROI after implementing automated testing. And since continuous testing brings automation to the next level, you can expect a boost in revenue.
Higher Customer Satisfaction
With CT’s advanced speed and quality, you can delight your customers with a true gem of an app.
- Early defect detection minimizes the risk of customers encountering issues.
- Regular testing ensures that features and functionalities are delivered as promised.
- A reliable and high-quality product fosters trust and loyalty among customers.
- By delivering updates and improvements promptly, continuous testing helps you stay competitive in the market.
- CT can help identify and address issues raised by customers, demonstrating responsiveness and commitment to improvement.
Google Cloud found that top companies with strong testing release code almost 1,000 times faster and recover from problems over 6,000 times quicker. For your users, this means quick and precise refinements and insanely fast issue resolution.
Today’s consumers are quite demanding. And that’s a good thing. It forces companies to innovate and strive for more. Now, people can’t wait over two seconds to load a page or bear to interact with clunky interfaces.
That’s where the advantages of continuous testing become most apparent – they allow you to create a product that redefines what users perceive as a good app.
Benefits of Continuous Testing: How It Works
There are quite a few success stories of continuous testing in e-commerce. To understand exactly how it works, we’d need to dive into the tech details of each case study. So, to save your time and make the advantages of continuous testing more visible, let’s compare it with traditional testing.
Traditional testing:
- Often performed during separate testing phases, such as integration testing or system testing.
- Relies heavily on manual software testing.
- Tests are often executed in batches, leading to delays in feedback.
- May not be tightly integrated with the development process.
Continuous testing:
- Tests are executed frequently, often after each code change.
- Leverages automation tools to execute tests efficiently.
- Provides immediate feedback to developers, enabling rapid issue resolution.
- Prioritizes testing based on risk to ensure critical areas are thoroughly tested.
It’s clear that the benefits of continuous testing are vast. Most importantly, CT puts you ahead of the competitors. But all these perks don’t come easily.
To Sum Up
CT changes up a lot of things when it comes to how you develop software. And that’s the number one roadblock to its adoption. Continuous testing requires a big shift in your culture, processes, and team. Though complicated, it’s fully achievable. You just need the right people on your crew. And QA Madness can help you with that.