CI For Automation Testing Framework

Let us consider that you have a critical project idea, and you want to set up an automation testing framework. A complex mobile application will need a lot of iteration right from the beginning. The complexities of the application may arise due to frequent changes in functionalities, adding new features, and running regression frequently to validate the changes. This will sway your project back and forth, consuming time, money, and effort, and the result will not equal up the effort made.

To end all the confusion, CI (continuous integration)/ CD (continuous deployment or delivery) is introduced at the very beginning of the software development lifecycle. The process offers a stable development environment and facilitates the automation testing framework with speed, safety, and reliability. It eliminates the challenges like lack of consistency and the numerous errors that arise due to human intervention of an application development process, ensuring that the users receive an error-free, end-product with a seamless user experience.  

What is CI/CD?

Technically speaking, CI/CD is a method that is frequently used to deliver apps to customers by using automation early in the app development stage. The main concepts associated with CI/CD include continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment.

We can think of it as a solution to various problems for the development and operations team while integrating new code.

With the introduction of CI/CD, developers have ongoing automation and continuous monitoring during the lifecycle of an application – be it the integration phase, testing phase, or delivery and deployment phase.

When we combine all these practices, it can be called the ‘CI/CD pipeline.’ Both development and operation teams work together in an agile way, either through a DevOps approach or site reliability engineering (SRE) approach.

Automation testing in CI/CD

Automation testing in CI/CD helps the QA engineers define, execute, and automate various tests. These tests allow the developers to access the performance of their applications in an innovative manner.

It can tell them whether their app build has passed or failed. Moreover, it can help in functionality testing after every sprint and regression for complete software.

Regression tests can run on their local environments before sending the code to the version control repository to save the team’s time.

However, automation testing isn’t confined to regression tests. Various other tests, such as static code analysis, security testing, API testing, etc., can be automated.

The central concept is to trigger these tests through web service or other tools that can result in success or failure.

Test automation framework runs on a set of guidelines, rules, and regulations. DevOps team needs to implement a proper test strategy following these guidelines, rules, and regulations before they start the testing process. They have to set the process right and decide when to introduce CI during the entire software testing lifecycle, when to start the execution, and the deployment process. Some of the key points to consider:

  • Evaluating test automation frameworks: Ensuring codeless representation of automated tests, that support data-driven tests, and concise reporting.
  • Choose the test automation framework based on the requirement: The different types of test automation framework include modular testing framework, data-driven framework, keyword-driven framework, and hybrid framework.
  • Defining the objective for automation: This is an important step where the objective of the test automation must be set clear. It includes choosing the right tools, skillsets, framework, current requirements, and considering the future trends.
  • Defining the benefits of the automation framework: Considering the benefits of the automation framework for faster test script creation, longer automation span, easy maintenance, reusability probability, and good data migration support.
  • Automation compliance: Testing the software for the latest regulatory compliance.

Benefits of deploying a CI/CD pipeline in automation testing framework

Wondering why a team should work on CI/CD pipeline? Here are some of the benefits associated with it:

  • Boosts DevOps efficiency

In the absence of CI/CD, developers and engineering teams are under immense pressure while carrying out their daily tasks. It could be due to service interruptions, outages, and bad deployments.

With the help of CI/CD, teams can eliminate manual tasks and thereby prevent coding errors. In addition, it will help them detect problems before deployment. This way, teams can work faster without having to compromise on the quality. Furthermore, since the manual tasks are automated, the release rates also decrease.

  • Smaller code changes

A significant technical benefit of CI/CD is that it helps integrate small pieces of code at one time. Therefore, it gets much easier and simpler to handle as compared to huge chunks of code. Also, there will be fewer issues to be fixed at a later stage.

With the help of continuous testing, these small codes can be tested as soon as they are implemented. It is a fantastic approach for large development teams working remotely or in-office.

  • Freedom to experiment

The CI/CD approach helps developers experiment with various coding styles and algorithms with much lesser risk than traditional software development paradigms.

If the experiment does not work as expected, it won’t ever appear in the production and can be undone in the next iteration set. This feature of competitive innovation is a decisive factor behind the fame of the CI/CD approach.

  • It improves reliability

With the help of CI/CD, you can improve test reliability to a great extent. It is because specific and atomic changes are added to the system. Therefore, the developers or QAs can post more relevant positive and negative tests for the changes. This testing process is also known as ‘Continuous Reliability’ within a CI/CD pipeline. This approach helps in making the process more reliable.

  • Customer satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is an essential aspect of the success of any product or application. It is a crucial factor that should be considered while releasing a new app or updating an existing one.

With the help of CI/CD, bugs are fixed while it is still in the development phase. Through automated Software Testing for Continuous Delivery, the feedback from the users is easier to integrate into the system. When you offer bug-free and quick updates on your app, it will help boost customer satisfaction.

  • Reduces the time to market

Another essential feature that makes CI/CD popular is the deployment time. The time to market plays a crucial role in the success of your product release. It helps increase engagement with your existing customers, gain more profit, support pricing, and get more eyeballs.

When you launch the product at the right time in the market, the product’s ROI will surely increase.

These are just a few benefits of CI/CD. It isn’t just a tool for software development but also an approach to set your business as a leader in the market.

Conclusion

CI/CD is an essential aspect of software building and deployment. It facilitates building and enhancing great apps with faster delivery time. Furthermore, continuous testing automation enables the app to go through the feedback cycle quicker and build better and more compatible apps.

Why Yethi for your projects?

Organizations need strategies and a customized testing environment to offer continuous testing with every integration and deployment. You cannot go wrong with the implementations. Our approach towards building an automation testing framework is agile. We offer continuous testing for all your integration and deployment ensuring that you get a stable, safe, and scalable product. The robotic capabilities of Tenjin – our codeless test automation platform, which enable to learn and adapt to the application and its updates. Tenjin, is a plug-and-play banking aware solution, continuous testing, minimizing the manual effort and speed up the test execution regardless of the complexity and number of updates.

Testing & Quality in Continuous Delivery, DevOps, and Observability

In today’s fast-paced world, development and deployment must go hand in hand to ensure timely delivery without compromising on quality. To support this modern application development approach, continuous delivery is implemented, where the code changes are automatically prepared and deployed for production. But often, when the development and operations are not managed well can lead to failure in the production of the application. To resolve this issue, DevOps comes to the rescue, it eliminates the conflicts and creates the perfect environment for building sustainable applications.

Deploying DevOps models is an integral part of the process that accelerates software deliveries while assuring a high-quality deliverable. To streamline the entire process and understand the success or failure of the process, it is important to establish continuous monitoring and observability. The observability process allows to collect the metric and decide on the next actional steps to be taken. Hence, DevOps and observability are essential criteria when it comes to testing and maintaining quality in the continuous delivery pipeline.

DevOps test strategy: The need for continuous testing in continuous development

Organizations are adopting the DevOps approach to develop software that streamlines the entire software development and delivery lifecycle. DevOps strategy involves implementing agile practices of continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) to ensure an easy and efficient result. The introduction of continuous testing verifies the operational structure, detects errors early, and resolves conflicts as soon as it is identified.

The goal of CI/CD and the associated continuous testing process in the DevOps methodology is to evaluate and eventually improve the quality of the process. Here, the testing, operations, infrastructure, QA, DevOps, development, and testing are interconnected. The effectiveness of the final result depends on these parameters.

How implementing continuous testing helps in the continuous delivery pipeline

  • It helps detect defects earlier, which eventually allows the company in reduced cost and improve quality
  • Continuous testing in quicker deployment
  • The automated testing system helps reduce the manual effort and improves the consistency and accuracy of the end results considerably
  • Since the testing starts at the early stage, it ensures a better test coverage
  • With better coverage and accuracy, application-related risks can be mitigated quickly
  • The transparency of the test results helps the developers to improve the software by implementing different techniques

As a part of the testing strategy, organizations are also investing in good DevOps tools. Some famous DevOps tools can be version-controlled source code managers like GitHub, GitLab etc. Organizations can also consider CI/CD pipeline engines to validate and deploy the application to the end-user during the development lifecycle. Using integration and delivery tools are a great help to solve problems.

For example, Cloud environments allow using Cloud resources to automate the deployment. As-a-Service models like SaaS, PaaS, IaaS allow the set of required resources to flawlessly generate code, test the code, and maintain the code.

Monitoring the progress is also a significant part of the development cycle. The code creation and security checks are significant parts of monitoring.

The need for observability in the CI/CD pipelines

The evolution of workflows to CI/CD approach is carried out in the advanced DevOps environment has proven to improve the quality by multiple folds. However, as the advancement progresses, they get associated with a new set of challenges. In order to mitigate any known or unknown risks, it is important to carefully analyze and control the process. The analysis metrics will help the teams to measure the success rate; this is done by implementing Continuous Monitoring and Observability process.

Advantages of continuous monitoring and observability

Vulnerability checks: When a new code is introduced in the system, it is essential to check what security vulnerabilities it can cause. It is important to implement constant observability to check the way the code is performing, any data leaks, or unauthorized activities. Continuous monitoring and observability will have a check on all possible threats and keep the team prepared to mitigate any kind of risk.

Understanding future trends: By implementing constant monitoring and observability, the organization can analyze the infrastructural and operational gaps. The metrics will help the organization to understand the future scope and build a solution to resolve the issue.

Reviewing the analysis: Continuous monitoring and observability allows the developers to have an elaborate result of the working of the system. Any discrepancy can be easily identified during the general observability process and given an opportunity to fix them before deployment.

Long-term analysis process: A similar QA process may not be feasible for testing different workflow systems. Hence, we cannot conclude the working of a certain process as a success or failure. On implementing a continuous monitoring process over a longer period of time, the process can be reviewed based on the data.

Ways to implement monitoring and observability

By implementing Monitoring and Observability in the production environment, the following can be achieved.

  • Help in getting prior indications regarding service degradation or outage
  • Easily detect unauthorized activities and bugs to resolve at the earliest
  • Identification of long-term trends is crucial for an organization. Monitoring and observability help organizations to find trends for business purposes and planning
  • It will help the organization to know the unexpected side effects of new functionality or changes.

Why is Yethi your perfect QA partner?

To achieve long-term success, installing tools is not sufficient, you need new ideologies and continuous support to succeed. Yethi is your perfect QA partner for helping you achieve your business goals. Having helped more than 90 customers across 18+ countries, we have emerged as one of the leading QA service providers in the BFSI industry.

Our test automation platform, Tenjin, is a 5th generation robotic platform that has a simplistic plug and play design. It can offer high test coverage with an end-to-end testing approach, and is capable of testing even the complex software system with utmost ease. Tenjin supports end-to-end testing and offers detailed metrics with its TTM (Tenjin Testing Management) solution.

Elastic QA; what is it, and why do you need it?

In this digital era, software solutions and applications are becoming an essential part of everyday products and services. Due to the high level of competitiveness in the market, customer experience has become the prime importance for businesses. To improve the effectiveness of this process, quality assurance (QA) of the product is incorporated to the Continuous Integration/ Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, known as QAOps. It demands the QA team to work closely with the software operations team and the development team.

Currently, 1.96 million applications are available on the Apple store, whereas 2.87 million applications are available on the Google Play store worldwide. The key to delivering an exceptional customer experience is quality. A rapidly evolving technology makes existing technologies outdated in a short time. To match the speed of technology and faster delivery of software, quality is often degraded. The poor quality leads to poor customer experience and losing one-third of software application users and reduces revenue. To maintain software release velocity while sustaining the quality, there is a need to upgrade the QA resources.

A contract-based QA testing resource hiring takes time as well as money, which are crucial in the software release cycle. Instead, this time can be reinvested into the business by introducing software test automation in QA testing resources. A partial or complete automated approach to QA testing resources still needs the human touch to ensure it resonates with people. Ultimately, people are going to use it and it should be optimized to enhance their user experience.

The quality and speed are critical components of the software release cycle and delivering a delightful experience to customers. A trending solution to achieve this is the Elastic QA that offers flexibility to QA testing.

What is Elastic QA?

An innovative approach to software QA testing is software testing automation. It is a volume-based model that provides elasticity (flexibility) to QA.

The world of QA is dynamic and is not one size fits all business areas. Some companies may have a huge in-house QA resource team, whereas others may have only a handful or no team to lean on for the software testing cycle. Additionally, the software release cycle may vary with the demand and requirements. Moreover, some companies keep releasing new updates or versions of their application weekly or monthly, while others may release new updates once in two-three months. Accordingly, the QA testing resource requirements vary while battling with the speed and quality of software release. The value in prioritizing quality is another vital component that should be on the priority list while carrying out QA tests.

Elastic QA is the solution to sort out the battle between speed, quality and value. It gives the blended approach to software testing by combining humans with technology. Elastic QA helps in delivering quality at speed and sees the real value! Elastic QA helps in flexing up and down the testing requirements and aligning with the QA team demands by leveraging third-party QA resources. Additionally, it helps in cycling the software releases. Thus, Elastic QA helps in alleviating the QA resource pressures and modern-day engineering unpredictability.

Need for Elastic QA

With many innovative and novel ideas and approaches in the software release cycle and QA testing, the question remains constant: Why should one adopt Elastic QA in the software QA testing and release cycle? Let’s see the primary reasons supporting the adoption of Elastic QA in QA testing resources.

Elastic QA ensures the cohesive software release cycle across various versions and updates, whether the Apple Store or Google Play Store and different versions of gadgets like smartphones, personal computers, tablets, or laptops. Complete coverage of different devices and an extensive network of QA testers help in faster software testing. Multiple testers work to identify the bugs and troubleshoot them, increasing the speed of testing and software through the eyes of several testers, ensuring quality.

The internal QA resource goes through a proper documentation channel that takes time to prepare the testing report. A faster response through the Elastic QA approach reduces the hiring needs of in-house QA resources saving time as well as money.

Elastic QA delivers real value to the business by allowing testers to focus on other business areas by automating the software QA testing. It ultimately secures the budget and allows other QA resources to meet their critical deadlines. 

Conclusively, Elastic QA does crowd-testing, saving time and money, while ensuring performance and security. It stretches internal resources and communicates workload balance to prevent bugs from falling through the cracks. A global network of QA testers ensures the software works absolutely fine in the local environment, allowing the release of the perfect version of the software working worldwide.

Why Yethi is your perfect QA partner?

As the software development trend is continuously growing, the testing trends are also evolving to address the new quality challenges. Yethi is here to help. We are a niche QA service provider for global banks and financial institutions, having helped more than 80 clients in 18+ countries. We are market leaders in offering QA services to banking/financial software working across multiple devices and networks. Our test automation platform, Tenjin, is a 6th generation robotic platform that has a simplistic plug and play design. It can offer high test coverage with end-to-end testing approach, and capable of testing even the complex software system with utmost ease. It removes delays and redundancies to ensure the system works at its best and offers a seamless experience to end-users. It offers greater flexibility for quicker deployment and can easily adapts to the changes in the underlying application without the need for scripting or recording.

Importance of Continuous Testing in Continuous Delivery and Integration

The quality of software can be determined when it adapts to changes and promptly responds without any delays. However, overtimes with extensive use the code may change, and manual testing needs to be conducted again to identify the impact of these changes on the functionalities of the system.

A software is manually tested at the software development stage but comes with several drawbacks as follows:

  1. Manual testing of regression packs delays the release of the software. It takes weeks and months to get feedback from the developers as the written code is tested. The entire process is relatively time-consuming and expensive.
  2. Even the most advanced and expert testers may not perform regression testing with accuracy. It might be hard to detect the impact of the set of changes in a complex software system through inspection.

All about Continuous Delivery

Alongside code writing, it is equally important to focus on quality during continuous delivery. Testers work closely with developers to help them create unit tests. They start by writing code to automate the small number of tests that cannot be covered by unit tests. Continuous delivery allows us to rapidly test product with our users and collect data on the possible outcome. Continuous delivery enables you to carry out experiments quickly in the on-going production stage.

With continuous delivery, there is no need to ensure quality of software at the end of the development cycle before its launch. The code goes straight to production allowing for quality check at the same time it is created. The testers closely work with the developers to ensure that the quality is maintained.

Automation propels testing and focuses on the quality of the applications, and so most of these applications are tested in the unit testing phase itself. The tested code is deployed at the production stage for continuous delivery as soon as it is checked into source code management and passes a deployment pipeline.

Why Continuous Testing is important?

Developing software and testing them are not two separate activities, but a part of the same equation. Hence, testing should be performed simultaneously along with developing the application. Automation like test automation, deployment automation, and environment automation allows you to execute these changes faster with minimum effort.

Application and systems need consistent updating of test documentation to keep it ready with the changes in the applications. Many different types of tests, both manual and automated, need to run continuously throughout the delivery process. Followed by continuous delivery and integration, continuous testing automation is included in the deployment pipeline. The deployment pipeline allows creating packages that can be implemented in any environment and runs unit tests, providing feedback to developers.

These test packages need to pass comprehensive automated tests that run against them. These packages are available for self-service other environments for activities such as exploratory testing, usability testing, and ultimately release after they pass all these automated tests. Automation testing is important for continuous delivery, which is followed by continuous deployment. Hence, it gives rise to the need for continuous testing to keep a track on changes.

In the deployment pipeline, the changes are implemented simultaneously with continuous integration during product release. If the common defects are not highlighted in the deployment pipeline, it could delay product release. However, some tests are improved and updated in the pipeline if defects are detected later. The focus here is to find the issues as early as possible to reduce the release time of the product.

How Continuous Testing can improve Continuous Delivery?

Implementation of continuous testing in continuous delivery can benefit your delivery pipeline. The following are the points that would explain how continuous testing can improve continuous delivery: –

  1. Executing API, UI, and Performance testing along with Regression testing will ensure the quality of the app in various customized cases. Continuous testing will allow the developers to perform a live test of the implementation, functionality, and behaviour of their code with testing tools.
  2. The DevOps team can implement parallel tests with automatic notifications after making the necessary configurations to the CI environment. Testers can notify developers whenever there is a failure in any build component. Testing of all changes can be done automatically using continuous integration.
  3. The QA team can verify and validate the product quality by running regression, load, and functional tests deployment. The automation testing will be continuously carried out if the test module configuration is correct. In case if there is a build failure in the system, it can be fixed by manual testing.  

There are some best practices for continuous testing in continuous delivery:

  1. Continuous testing enables you to test operating systems and devices before production. It saves money in the long run as instead of running a large volume of test cases, load tests implemented every day at specific target areas reveal smaller bugs and fix them immediately.
  2. Accurate results can be obtained conducting test simultaneously during the development phase as compared to running tests in a controlled lab environment.
  3. Detecting defects and fixing them will be much easier and can run at the same time if the entire test suite is divided into several smaller tasks.
  4. To have adequate knowledge and detect the issues or discrepancies in app architecture and test automation, the metrics must be properly used. Proper use of metrics can also help up to prevent the risk of failures and its impact.

Conclusion

Continuous deployment and continuous delivery require a well-structured and planned environment for continuous testing. In absence of which CI and CD effort would not be successful. At Yethi Consulting, we follow an agile test automation framework. Our scriptless test automation platform, Tenjin, is a plug-and-play banking aware solution. Its robotic capabilities enable them to learn and adapt to the application and its updates. Regardless of the complexity and number of updates, Tenjin facilitates continuous testing, minimizing the manual effort and speed up the test execution.