Are open-source test automation tools reliable for banking systems?

Banks are steadily adopting open-source test automation tools. Let us explore why banks rely on open-source test automation tools. Banks in less than half a decade have witnessed growth in technology and digital advancement. Open-source test automation tools offer banks a competitive advantage to remain updated with technological development.

It helps banks in cost reductions, stability, easy accessibility, training testers, testing in-house developed applications, and more. Because of its benefits and advantages, open-source test automation tools have evolved as an industry standard and became a necessity for banks and financial industry. It allows people working and evaluating the framework in large groups to identify errors, flaws, and technical glitches with ease.

The current age banking systems

Banking systems in the current times see a greater digital acceleration. The banks and financial institutions confronted the most fastidious situation and came out unharmed. The banking system is healthier and stronger in handling adverse scenarios after dealing with a global pandemic. Banks and financial industry have seen significant growth in technologies in recent times. Banks now follow the latest open banking trend, and there is unrestricted growth globally.

As per a recent report in Statista, the number of open banking users worldwide is expected to grow at an average annual rate of nearly 50% between 2020 and 2024, with the European market being the largest. As the graph shows, in 2020, Europe counted approximately 12.2 million open banking users. This figure is expected to reach 63.8 million by 2024. As of 2020, 24.7 million individuals worldwide used open banking services, a number that is forecast to reach 132.2 million by 2024. This growth in technology requires steadfast system validation to ensure that banks continue to perform and innovate.

The benefits of open-source test automation tools

To substantiate the question, “are open-source test automation tools reliable for banking systems” I will state a few benefits of open-source test automation tools in this article. Let us go through the reasons one by one to understand why open-source test automation is reliable for banking systems.

  • Better support and collaboration – There are vast fields of information available on the internet that testers can consult to overcome obstacles. Open-source framework enriches online communities, which allow the team from different locations to interact and collaborate with each other via a centralized server. There is a constant flow of information transfer within the community without any downloads and uploads.
  • Cost-efficient – The open-source test automation platform has low licensing costs and minimal hardware needs. The testing components are easily reused and have greater scalability, making the task of managing the performance and load testing easy. Testers can adjust total cloud storage based on the testing requirements making it flexible for organizations to opt for a pricing plan. All mentioned above help reduce the cost of using an open-source test automation framework.
  • Prompt testing – Open-source tools hasten the test cycles making it much shorter than the cycles run with traditional tools. Setup and tool deployment are prompt without the need of installing. The productivity remains unaffected as test updates are tracked in real-time. It reduces the overall time to market making the organization to focus on the quality and deliverables.
  • Overall quality – Several users and developers come together to ensure the quality and security of the open-source platform. The team comprises multiple developers across the globe who are among the best in innovating, improving, and enhancing the quality of the open-source test automation platform so that the users get a high-quality test automation package.
  • Easy to customize – The open-source test automation software comes with a customizable option to suit the specific requirements of the testing department. The codes are easily editable and offer smooth functionality.
  • Virtualization – Virtualization reduces the cost by easily sharing resources and making the best use of their respective skills. Virtualization ensures that testing is more efficient and user-friendly.
  • No restrictions – Open-source test automation platforms allow the organization to work with skilled teams and individuals. Users can fast track the decision-making process with complete control of the execution process. As the highly competent users and developers form a global community, there is uninterrupted support without restrictions.

Open-source test automation tools reform the banking systems

The banking and financial industry is undergoing a massive shift with the appearance of agile and DevOps practices. The importance of software Quality Assurance has increased to ensure the reliability and stability of banking software. Banking systems must be updated with regulatory and functionality changes frequently. Testing the applications from the start will only increase the time to market.

To eliminate the delays, banks and financial institutions are embracing DevOps practices. They are speeding up frequent iteration by establishing CI/CD pipelines and releasing small segments of applications in batches. QA teams are enabling early testing by taking the shift-left approach. Organizations are adopting the DevOps methodology that combines the development and testing teams to focus on a result-oriented QA process. The development team works in a cohesive manner where the development teams create and run unit tests while the test teams validate these at the API and UI layers.

As application development adapts the cloud native technologies, they are built with service packages and deployed as microservices. Open-source test automation tools speed up the testing process of financial and banking applications while reducing cost, enhancing stability, and offering easy accessibility. Banking applications are now managed on cloud infrastructure through DevOps processes and continuous delivery workflows making it accessible, flexible, and scalable.

The teams can ensure high software stability as test automation helps to achieve a larger test coverage and higher level of regression testing. Teams are also focusing on preventing and predicting application performance issues as a result organizations are replacing performance testing techniques with performance engineering.

Different types of open-source testing tools

To test the different types of banking applications and interfaces, the organizations must select the testing tools. The selection of testing tools must be based upon the two functional or non-functional testing aspects. The areas included in functional testing are Web UI, mobile app UI, and API validation, whereas the non-functional test areas include performance, reliability, scalability, and accessibility. The following are the types of open-source test automation tools that can help us to validate the banking software.

  • BDD based test automation tools

Testers or business analysts can create test cases in uncomplicated text language using BDD or Behaviour Driven Development framework. This software development approach allows even non-technical team members to understand the project details.

  • API automation testing tools

Teams are adopting agile and DevOps methodologies and shift-left testing approach that shortens the release cycles. It is imperative to execute API testing as it bridges the differences between unit and GUI layer testing.

  • Mobile test automation tools

The open-source test automation framework can help to automate workflows for native, hybrid and web apps. Many tools offer cross-platform support and JIRA integration.  Mobile test automation tools can automate workflows of iOS, Android, and Windows apps and offer support for multiple programming languages like Java, Ruby, Python, PHP, JavaScript, and C#.

  • Performance testing tools

Performance testing tools are intended for load testing of web applications. Many such tools are open-source test automation tools offering load and performance testing for cloud-native applications, APIs and microservices. A few performance testing tools allow writing test cases in ES6 JavaScript, while other tools offer built-in support for HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2 and Web Socket protocols. Some open-source test automations tools can be introduced into automation pipelines in Jenkins, GitLab, Azure DevOps, CircleCI and other CI/CD tools for performance regression testing.

  • Reliability and stability testing tools

These open-source test automation tools offer services on the cloud for generating various kinds of failures, detecting abnormal conditions, and testing the ability to endure the adversities. The main goal of focus of reliability and stability testing tools are to keep the cloud applications safe, secure with high reliability and stability.

  • Accessibility testing tools

Open-source accessibility testing tools offer thorough application testing to ensure that even the people with disabilities or specially challenged, of all age groups and different races, can use the applications without any issues or disruption. However, application testing must remain compliant with accessibility standards like WCAG 2.1 level AA and AAA, Section 508, ADA and EN 301.

Conclusion

Banking in current times is evolving fast. If it must keep up with the pace of fast changing technology landscape, the banking QA software QA must be ready to adopt newer techniques and tool sets. Banking and financial applications are the most versatile. Each application has functionalities only specific to the requirements, hence, to maintain the quality of the applications it must follow the e2e testing process. This article highlights the different open-source test automation tools and how banks can rely on them for their software testing.

QA Transformation is key to Digital Readiness

The importance of QA is increasing steadily with the growth in digitalization, with 40% of the financial sectors have already adopted DevOps. As now more and more companies are embracing agile methodology and DevOps, they are meeting the growing demands for the fastest product delivery incorporated with continuous feedback. There is now a greater dependency on continuous testing with an increasing need for faster product delivery.

In agile methodology, the testing team is a part of a core development team, which nudges them to be ready for any subsequent changes in software and develop it accordingly. Software testing has been evolving, from manual testing to automation, open-source frameworks, agile, DevOps, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI / CD). With a continuously evolving approach to testing, the development team enables faster deployment of software reducing the time-to-market.

What is QA transformation?

QA transformation means focusing on user experience while ensuring the information security of the application. Meeting customers’ expectations, needs and focusing on customer satisfaction are the key parameters that drive QA transformation.

For example – In a pandemic situation, such as the current COVID-19, there has been a surge of new applications to address customer needs. Not restricting just to quantity of digital products, these applications focus on quality as well as variety, spanning across different sectors namely banking and financial sectors, GPS tracker and COVID19 cases tracker, video calling and teleconference platform, online delivery of grocery, food, and medicine delivery. With continuous feedback and integration, these apps were released faster in the market than we could anticipate.

Companies adapting to automation, open-source frameworks, agile, DevOps, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI / CD) helped them in reducing the time-to-market. As software testing is quickly emerging, it relies heavily on codeless test automation, AI/ ML, RPA, and more. Since QA practice evolved with these methodologies, it facilitated the growth, flexibility, scalability, and sustainability of the digital platform.  

How important is a good QA practice?

A well-structured QA program follows complete quality metrics to facilitate digital transformation, hence, ensuring the quality of the software becomes essential. Based on customer requirements companies determine their QA resources their respective roles to accomplish the digital transformation goals.

QA plays a crucial role in digital transformation. QA helps in,

  • Protecting brand image 

A good QA practice is to consider user experience across multiple digital platforms. This includes improving user access reducing response time and improving consistency in brand perception.

  • Enhancing product quality

The end-users need a high-quality product for glitch-free performance. The right QA practice eliminates performance bottlenecks and enhances the quality of products to ensure user satisfaction.

  • Ensuring User Satisfaction

Attaining complete coverage of user requirements and expectations by designing and automating test cases. Implementing solutions and accumulating test data for test automation and ensuring customer experience. 

Benefits of QA in Digital Transformation

As automation, open-source frameworks, agile, DevOps, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI / CD), methodologies are growing more than ever before, these are becoming an integral part of the Software Development Lifecycle. Following are some of the benefits that the development team would experience following the methodologies.

  • Ensure Application Security

Continuous system integration exposes an application to many bugs and defects. Hence, the developers and testers follow definite processes and methodologies to continuously improve the quality of the application throughout the QA transformation process.

Collecting customer-sensitive data ensures application security by reducing the chance of exposure to risks. A quality assurance plan allows companies to identify the risks and build software that continues to perform even during a crisis.

The customers’ sensitive information and data can be misused, due to improper QA plans and prevailing technical glitches in software, which leads to loss of market share and customer reputation.

To avoid these unforeseen scenarios, organizations are investing in digitalization and building QA strategies, which is expected to play a crucial role in ensuring business growth and sustenance.

  • QA Transformation improves user experience

Over the years, companies are striving to improve customer experience and gain a competitive edge in the market with the emergence of new trends and technologies like Big Data, Cloud services, and Mobility services. The technologies that are driving digital transformation are unlikely to provide results without appropriate digital assurance and quality metrics.

Following a proper quality transformation strategy and planning prepares organizations to adopt digitalization promptly, as with every innovation your platform, process and system remain ready to adapt to frequent changes saving you time, money, and effort.

A prior quality assurance planning and testing ensure that your applications are compatible across all devices and browsers and offer seamless customer experience in a real-time user environment.

Interesting here, as it may seem, the QA or testing teams are leveraging test automation tools for repeated tests across devices and operating systems to ensure flawless integration, performance, and user acceptance.

  • QA Transformation allows you to adopt new technologies

As enterprises adapt to new technologies, it brings along multiple challenges such as system integration with existing, being familiar with the new technology with work culture, training, development requirements, and more. The QA transformation allows you to measure, manage and integrate processes to deliver financial and timely benefits consistently.

Organizations build their own Testing Center of Excellence (TCoE) to adopt robust processes and get test results through the test transformation process. Various teams build quality metrics and assessment models to measure the impact of the newly adopted technology on the overall transformation process.

Quality Assurance impact on Digital Transformation Initiatives

The DevOps enables continuous delivery, continuous deployment, and continuous integration. Since testing is an integral and inseparable part of DevOps, some of the test engineers have coined it as, “DevTestOps”. The functional testers are now adapting to the more agile framework and intensively performing A/B testing, NFC testing, mobile testing (functional and automated), system integration, data testing and more.

Agile Awareness in QA Transformation

Companies’ leap in adapting to the agile methodology has made the QA teams in companies struggle with the implementation of the agile development model and the end-to-end transformation to the agile framework.

An agile QA should be open to change and adoption of glitch-free techniques. Following a few steps will allow a smooth transition from traditional to agile QA. QA is an integral part of the development process, and it needs to be considered as one. QA does not just only focus on improving the quality of the application, it reduces the risk factor redefines and transforms the process.

Steps for successful QA transformation

  • The QA team needs to be trained in agile methodology so that they can be more receptive to digital changes.
  • Before rolling out the transition to agile, a few pilot projects need to be introduced. This will allow you to build agile competency and lower the risk of transition.
  • Since traditional QA is very different from the agile methodology, which follows an iterative approach and an adaptive model, developers and testers should take up more ownership in terms of responsibilities.
  • The QA team are expected to be more competent to write any kind of code. Conventional methods and processes are no longer applicable if you are looking for a smooth transition to agile QA.
  • Test automation is a key feature of testing, developing, and deploying the software. The developers and testers should work in perfect coordination until the automation results are achieved.

Conclusion –

At Yethi, our team is driven by in-depth knowledge of the domain and technology systems support, coupled with the requisite skill set. We are a team of quality assurance professionals focused on the BFSI industry. We have helped many organizations globally in ensuring the quality of their applications while reducing their turnaround time, time-to-market.

Yethi’s flagship 6th generation codeless test automation tool – Tenjin is an intuitive automated test suite, which is built with features for seamless system integration and flawless performance. With agile, granular, and multi-system test capabilities, Tenjin can interact with multiple applications through APIs.

Role of Test Automation in DevOps

DevOps is a multidisciplinary approach that creates an advanced development environment by combining development, IT operations, modern practices, and tools. When test automation is carried out along the DevOps pipeline it aids in faster deployment of the software. DevOps supports continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD), allowing the testing to be conducted earlier in the software development cycle. When testing is conducted earlier, it offers a much larger scope to improve the product quality by rectifying the errors/bugs in the earlier stage, which would otherwise amplify and cause severe issues if left unidentified earlier.

The success of the DevOps lifecycle depends on test automation which ensures that the developed software quality is top-notch. Continuous testing is a critical part of the DevOps cycle that lowers the operational and infrastructural risk and facilitates greater quality and improved speed, reduced cost, and increased accuracy. Hence, the success/failure of the end-product depends on developing it in a DevOps environment and implementing automation testing along the pipeline.

 Test Automation and DevOps

DevOps is the modern-day software development approach that can achieve the desired speed and agility by implementing test automation. Automation testing plays a pivotal role as it supports the dynamic CI/CD pipeline of the DevOps cycle. DevOps is a cultural shift that organizations are embracing for better and faster deployment, and test automation improves the quality with nearly 100% accuracy.

By implementing test automation, DevOps practice can benefit from the following:

  • Increases the process reliability
  • Test automation can detect the bugs earlier, hence, making the product deployment easier and quicker
  • The error rate is considerably reduced
  • Simplifies the process and promotes accurate and faster test case execution

Fig – DevOps Lifecycle

In the DevOps cycle, the test automation process has taken a shift-left approach, wherein testing is performed from the beginning of the software development cycle, reducing the length of delivery time while improving the quality of the release. This approach is purely focused on improving the quality to offer a great user experience, which will eventually improve the brand value and ROI.

How does the Automation Testing Process improve the previous cases?

The automation Testing process reduces the SDLC life cycles and follows the points mentioned below to improve the previous cases –

  • Improves speed
  • Offers fast feedback
  • Provide reliable results
  • Efficient result
  • Minimizes time and cost
  • Minimal human intervention

What role does Automation Testing play in DevOps?

Test Automation plays a crucial role in the following situations:

  • Incorporating test automation in DevOps, manual testing is minimized considerably as the automation processes take over. As the process is automated, the obvious human errors can be reduced and proven to be successful for repeated executions and regression tests.
  • It comparatively becomes easier to check an application after each step than to compare it at the end of the deployment. It makes it easier to correct each step than finding bugs after completing the software.
  • As advanced coding knowledge may be required for conducting testing at the API level, automation testing handles this task with ease as the process is automated and does not demand any coding knowledge. However, coding may be required only to set the process.
  • To correct the test cases in an estimated time limit and remove the errors, developers must change the code multiple times. The automation testing process offers an easy way to overcome these problems.

How to make test automation successful in DevOps

Here are a few points to consider yielding the best results from using test automation in DevOps:

Implementing testing simultaneous to the development

In the DevOps cycle operating on a continuous release approach, testing is carried out simultaneously to the development. By following this approach, issues can be fixed early and efficiently. This is an efficient way to reduce cost and improve time-to-market with improved quality.

Flexible test scripts

As the DevOps process consists of continuous integration, it is important to create flexible test scripts of higher quality to support the continuous integration process. The flexible scripts will support regression tests to ensure high accuracy and performance.

Choosing the right automation tool

It is important to choose the right test automation tool that will support the DevOps process efficiently. Make sure to use the tool that possesses all the capabilities that will suit your requirements.

Maintaining single test flow

It is recommended to test one thing at a time. Single flow testing will reduce the process complexity and makes it easier to find out the faults. Running multiple tests at a time can be a cumbersome process.

Building reusable test cases

Building reusable test cases will considerably reduce the time, cost, and hassle being taken to create a new test case. Organizations have reported that they have saved immense time and cost by creating reusable test cases.

Codeless test automation

Codeless test automation is the ideal choice for testing in a DevOps environment as it allows easy and faster product release across the complex CI/CD pipeline. Codeless test automation helps achieve the business objective by improving quality while reducing cost and risk.

Yethi’s test automation solution for banks and financial institutions

DevOps is the trend in the software development process banking and financial software processes are no different. To support the complex banking/finance software and ensure the developed software system is of high quality, Yethi offers a world-class test automation solution. Its test automation platform, Tenjin, is a 5th generation tool with robotic UI plug and play capabilities that can automatically learn and relearn to give higher testing accuracy.

Tenjin will help address the functional and non-functional issues in the complex banking/financial software system. With its half a million-test case repository, Tenjin can significantly help reduce time, effort, and money.

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.

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.