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.

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.

Emerging Trends in Performance Testing

Creating a visually appealing website with seamless functionality is great, but if it crashes easily or fails to work under higher traffic, it can never be a successful one. Hence, performance testing is a crucial parameter when it comes to software testing. It gives a clear picture of how the website/ application is performing in terms of speed, thereby, offering scope to increase its robustness and reliability.

Performance testing is a rapidly developing field and has witnessed enormous advancements, especially in the recent years. Teams are trying to move to quicker, cheaper, agile, and more accessible methods to improve the performance testing process.

Like the previous years, this year too will witness new trends in performance testing that will enable more responsive development in shorter spans with fewer risks factors. The emerging trends in performance testing are discussed here in detail.

Latest trends in performance testing

The new trends in performance testing are still at a nascent phase and will make their presence in the market much sooner than we anticipate. Here are some of the popular testing trends that will transform software QA in the near future.

Artificial Intelligence

The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in performance testing for websites and apps is not new. AI automation is slowly making its presence as a go-to option for testing and QA teams at every stage of performance testing.

The use of artificial intelligence in performance testing for websites and applications is expected to grow further in the upcoming years and become a significant trend of all time.

Internet Of Things Testing Market

The Internet of Things (IoT) has seen rapid growth in the last few years, and this growth is expected to continue in the future too at a larger scale. This means that there will be millions of devices operating in various unique environments. Testers will face new challenges to ensure that the testing cycle, performance, and security aren’t compromised. To mitigate these risks, testers will have to adopt an IoT-focused approach, leading to the rise of Cloud-based and IoT testing environments.

Cloud-based Testing

Cloud computing services are becoming popular for functional and non-functional software testing. There are a plethora of benefits of using Cloud-based tools for performance testing. Some of them are:

  • High Scalability: With a Cloud-based platform, unlimited users can carry out performance testing simultaneously.
  • Low Cost: It allows on-demand resource provisioning for performance testing for websites and software without the need of building infrastructure, thereby, helping reduce performance testing costs.
  • Supports Production Environment Testing: Generally, traditional, older tools allow performance testing only in the test environment. However, with Cloud-based tools for performance testing, the testing can be carried out in the production environment as well.

Open-source Tools for Performance Testing

Open-source tools promote collaboration by giving testers the ability to view and edit the source code. This leads to the team working efficiently and helps create a better product while reducing the production cycle time. Additionally, they also provide an easy learning platform for new testers. No doubt that open-source performance testing tools have become quite popular in the testing community and will remain an integral part of it.

DevOps

DevOps is a collaborative approach combining Development (Dev) and IT Operations (Ops). It involves all the stakeholders in the software development process until the product is delivered to the client. DevOps aims to reduce the software development life cycle while delivering high-quality end-products to the client. To accomplish this, DevOps involves a highly interconnected, collaborative, and agile approach. Looking forward, DevOps seems to be the go-to approach for many organizations due to the various benefits it delivers.

Production Testing

Another emerging trend in performance testing is testing the software or website in the production environment. Generally, performance testing is done in the development, staging, and pre-production environments. However, in production testing, the new code changes are tested on live user traffic on the production software itself.

Production testing allows only a small set of users to be exposed to the software. The testing team then carries out performance testing for websites or applications and rolls out new features to check user responses. They can verify whether the software or website works as intended or not. Some of the techniques used for production testing include:

  • A/B testing: Testers can compare two versions/features at the same time to see which one provides a better user experience.
  • Blue-Green deployment: It involves running two production environments that are as identical as possible. It helps reduce downtime and risks as it enables gradual and safe transfer of user traffic from a previous version of the app or software to the new one.
  • Security Testing: Data threats and attacks have increased in the last few years, resulting in tangible and intangible losses for every party involved. Thus, every stakeholder, including businesses, has realized the importance of data safety. Testing teams, too, have prioritized security testing in performance testing to avoid any undesired instances. The threats are expected to only increase as we steadily move to a more interconnected world. That is why software testing teams must become competent to detect and neutralize threats at the earliest.

Behavior-driven development

Behavior-driven development (BDD) is an agile approach that encourages collaboration with shared tools and processes to create a mutual understanding between testers on how the end-product will behave. In BDD, the testing team needs to build test cases based on user behavior and interactions to create a high-quality end-product. BDD is expected to gain further prominence as AI goes mainstream in performance testing.

These are the top emerging trends in performance testing that one should watch out for in the next few years. However, given the unprecedented changes, we might see the addition of these new trends much sooner in the future. Similarly, some of the emerging trends may vanish before they become mainstream due to various challenges in implementing them on a larger scale. Businesses, testers, and individuals will need to keep themselves updated about new developments in the industry to stay ahead of the curve.

Why choose Yethi for performance testing?

Yethi is a niche QA service provider for global banks and financial institutions that offers efficient end-to-end testing. Our flagship, Tenjin, is a codeless test automation platform that can carry out all aspects of functional and non-function testing with nearly 100% accuracy. Tenjin executes high-level performance testing to identify the responsiveness, availability, and scalability of the system. It performs multiple rounds of tests to check the consistency of the system. Our aim is to ensure that your application performs at its best even during increased, load, stress, and volume.

Resolving Quality Issues Across DevOps Pipeline

DevOps has transformed the process of software development and testing. It is a multidisciplinary approach that brings together the development and operation departments together. This strategy leads to a cultural shift where professionals from both groups work together, thus, leading to better synergy, usage of automation across the board, and more flexibility. DevOps strategies lead to streamlining multiple processes, reducing errors, and building a faster and more successful deployment process.

The smooth collaboration between the development and the operations team offered by DevOps promotes quicker product delivery. Here, testing is performed alongside the development giving scope to identify bugs earlier in the product development cycle. This approach expands the scope of software testing and reduces the occurrence of bugs significantly.

6 Quality issues with DevOps and how to solve them

Performance Issues

Practicing continuous integration and deployment tends to make processes in any industry faster. However, sometimes a team’s performance could be slower with continuous deployment than with manual work.

Solution: DevOps team should analyze if their processes are efficient enough. Although automated processes are faster than manual ones, they still need to be analyzed to choose the right tool that will help them to meet their business goals.

Users should check if all the steps in their DevOps processes are necessary. Removing unnecessary steps is an excellent way to reduce complications and get consistent results. User metrics also helps to analyze the stages of the process, such as how much time each task takes. When analyzing metrics, it is recommended that the team figures out the maximum capacity. Some tools may not work fast enough, so they need to be replaced with upgraded technology.

Security Issues

Sometimes development teams could take shortcuts due to a production rush, either due to an extended holiday period or a huge deal. This could lead to a compromise of the system’s security. Huge incidents could lead to loss of billions of dollars and potential bankruptcy, and also affect the brand reputation adversely.

Solution: The team should maintain consistent security hygiene. This includes keeping access to vital tools for CI (Continuous Integration) and CD (Continuous Deployment) secure. Highly secure passwords are still the safest bet.

Contrary to popular belief, CI/CD jobs should be executed with the fewest number of privileges, not the most. If a hacker reconfigures a system that has more permissions than necessary, it could break the production cycle. When the system has been reset to safety, plenty of data could be hacked and stolen, leading to losses to intellectual and monetary property.

Separate Tools Set for Development and Operations Teams

One of the biggest challenges is the implementation of different sets of tools for both the development and operations teams. Identifying and synchronizing the differences between the two teams is vital for running a business smoothly.

Solution: Better collaboration would lead to increased productivity for the DevOps teams. Teams should strive to work towards a unified goal and be trained to understand how to achieve them.

A complete set of instructions and better communication would guarantee the best results. Data could be tested to see if the team has successfully deployed understanding the business problems, training tests, and work schedule maintenance.

Version Control Management Issues

The CI & CD processes are created specifically, keeping the company’s goal in mind. But sometimes, the software undergoes a major update, especially at the time of deployment, and everything could crash, or an urgent task could completely stall. 

Solution: One solution could be to disable auto-updates so that any impediments do not arise in the work schedule. The team must prioritize stability over the newest release date. During deployment, it is a better option to use the stable version of the software rather than the latest one.

In addition, we believe there should be a DevOps team that can be responsible for version control. They could maintain a record of newer versions and features and check to see if they can still support previous systems.

However, not updating the software for a long time can leave the DevOps team vulnerable to viruses in the system as well as outdated technology. While newer updates need to be analyzed, they should not be avoided and put to good use when necessary.

Regular Testing

If testing software is not well-strategized, or a wrong approach is taken to it, it can lead to problems in production and distribution.

Solution: Developers must take test results as seriously as possible. Sometimes, assumptions are made that some minor glitches during testing would not appear in real-time, but the company would have to pay a heavy price if something goes wrong.

Developers should deploy approval procedures for new features to prevent software with bugs from being deployed. They should also focus on writing automation and unit tests. Experts have suggested that as a bare minimum, DevOps should ensure that there are UI and API automated tests.

Finally, developers should test their optimizations regularly. Initial iterations could be lighter and faster to deploy. However, as one keeps adding more code, each optimization could become more complex and bring lesser value. Developers should approach it carefully, as the gains derived from optimization may not match up to the constant investments made to upgrade it.

Resistance to Change

Sometimes the organization may feel resistant to the idea of shifting to a DevOps setup. Proposing that the change is necessary may not go well with certain team members, who think that it reflects poorly on their current efforts.

Solution: Like any significant change, DevOps’ change would be gradual and not happen overnight. When employees are shown the importance of DevOps and given different essential roles that contribute to the development process, the DevOps culture becomes more ingrained.

Teams must find a product or existing application and replicate its performance in a DevOps setup. If employees can see the benefits, they are more likely to adopt the changes to employ the DevOps strategies.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we would say that while the DevOps pipeline can bring certain limitations, those changes are manageable and can help an organization soar to amazing heights post its implementation.

Continuous Testing: What Every DevOps Team Needs to Know

Organizations are constantly investing in their digital transformation journey to enhance their business operations in today’s fast-paced competitive market. But, if done incorrectly, the advanced digital initiatives can hamper their projected growth, leading to a considerable waste of resources and leaving them in worse condition than before. Hence, organizations have come to terms that they should test their technology platforms. Additionally, they have learned to improve the management of their connections with their employees, customers, systems, and the data for the success of the digital transformation initiatives. Continuous testing can help organizations through the transition phase and minimize the risks associated with the software assets.

First introduced to decrease the time to receive developers’ feedback, continuous testing aims to test more often, especially at the early stage of development, and then test the entire unified codebase.

Continuous testing allows organizations to seamlessly integrate their software with legacy systems and boost their business efficiencies. For the DevOps team, continuous testing plays a massive role in skyrocketing their growth.

What is Continuous Testing?

Continuous testing involves testing early in the development lifecycle. It carefully evaluates software quality as part of the ongoing delivery process due to testing regularly.

In a traditional framework of testing, software is transferred by one team to another with a project that has clearly defined development and quality assurance (Q&A) phases. This process would demand a significant amount of time from the QA team to ensure quality, since it was prioritized over the project schedule. However, as today’s organizations have no choice but to deliver software to their customers rapidly, the traditional framework isn’t a feasible option.

With a continuous DevOps process, organizations can release software changes faster while moving from development to testing to deployment. Moreover, continuous testing helps DevOps teams to explore critical issues in the initial stages of development itself. As a result, it helps mitigate the risk of bugs beforehand and saves companies the cost of fixing errors further down the line. Continuous testing in DevOps also involves various stakeholders such as the development team, DevOps team, Quality assurance (QA) team, and operational staff.

Continuous Testing in DevOps

DevOps has its architecture, system, resource, and the process that operate. On its process side, there’s a strong culture of cross-discipline collaboration. Most of the time, developers collaborate when they produce code and pair-programming. Their work is frequently measured in days or hours of work. After the development is done, the code is ready for production, not for intervention.

On its technology part, DevOps understands and automates handover code between previously siloed departments. Continuous testing in DevOps concentrates on breaking down the silos of testing and QA to spread out to participate in the entire software development lifecycle.

In the DevOps environment, continuous testing can thrive if the organization is committed to transforming itself positively. But, for its successful execution, organizations shouldn’t be hung up on the most popular tools for the continuous delivery environment but instead spend their time deciding how these tools are tied together. Their ability to ensure seamless information exchange between tools can achieve the continuous aspect of their automation process. And in the process, it can remove the need for manual intervention. 

Steps for Continuous Testing in DevOps

Establishing stable automation

Stable automation is the first step in DevOps Continuous Testing. Developers can have stable automation once the testing issues across the DevOps are remediated and smart reporting for clearly discerning between real problems and false negatives.

Running a daily cycle

In the next phase, the DevOps team should add a limited number of scripts into a repetitive pattern that runs at least once a day, automatically, successfully, and unattended on different platforms.

Increasing Coverage

After the stable connection runs at a reliable pace, the next phase is to increase the test coverage. Since the numbers can vary, the DevOps team should reach valuable and meaningful functional and non-functional test automation coverage. The original range may be from 90 – 95%  The parts that are not automated will only occur at the end of the cycle.

Doing Continuous testing throughout the day

The final stage is continuous testing. In this stage, the process moves from automated testing every night to multiple times a day. The benefits of it are faster feedback, better accuracy as well as minimized risk. It also provides developers with better flexibility during the entire development cycle and usually reduces their defects by 50%.

Best practices for DevOps continuous testing

Successful integration of continuous testing in DevOps needs a high level of collaboration, where everyone maintains quality and cooperation. The team should decide on test cases before commencing coding. A few practices of continuous testing for DevOps include:

  • Decreasing test waiting times with testing carried across all the stages of the delivery pipeline by reducing complexity.

  • The testing should cover all aspects of a DevOps lifecycle. It will provide developers the feedback they need across all stages to ensure the quality of the software is under control.

  • Organizations should access the requisite DevOps tools, dependencies, and resources to be successful with continuous testing.

Continuous testing is integral to DevOps’ continuous integration and deployment process pipeline. With continuous testing, the continuous integration/ continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline continually moves from the development to testing to deployment process.

Benefits of Continuous Testing DevOps

Continuous testing comes with many benefits for DevOps. Here is an overview of a few of them:

  • Discovers critical bugs early
  • Provides a smooth collaboration among developers, QA, and Operations team
  • Enable developers to assess the quality of software at an early stage
  • Removes the testing bottleneck from the DevOps procedure
  • Delivers a stable user experience
  • Assist in providing test results at a faster pace that results in improving the overall code quality
  • Allows for a quicker time to market with a viable product as well as a continuous feedback mechanism

Conclusion

By understanding DevOps Continuous Testing’s architecture, steps and incorporating best practices, organizations can hope to deliver high-quality software while engaging in a continuous testing mindset to differentiate themselves from their competitors.

Why choose Yethi?

Yethi is a leading QA service provider to global banks and financial institutions, which is committed to address and resolve the quality challenges faced by organizations. Its test automation platform, Tenjin, is a 6th generation robotic platform that has a simplistic plug and play design. With its high-test coverage, it can effortlessly remove any redundancies and makes sure the system performs at its best. It offers great performance, flexibility, precision, and consistency for a seamless user experience.

Digitalization: Learning from Workflow Testing

Digital technologies have gained momentum in the last few years reshaping the business models and helping companies to explore new opportunities to scale up efficiencies and improve customer satisfaction. This trend of evolving technologies has led to the progress of digital workflow systems, to provide greater insight and efficiencies. To keep the digital workflow system up and running, organizations are innovating and streamlining the existing processes. Having business operations and software development closely interact and adopting practices such as DevOps, businesses have accelerated digital adoption cycles.

Every organization is creating a new digital transformation strategy to efficiently incorporate digital workflow and remove any hurdles associated with integration, processing, and maintenance. This process of building and implementing the digital workflow strategy should be backed by strong quality assurance teams and powerful test automation practices. Strong QA process will help bring faster stability to the systems, detect even the slightest of errors, and provide faster updates to the developer to fix any issues. Hence, the test automation forms an inevitable part of the modern, digital workflows.

Redefining the role of test automation in digital workflows

With the increasing emphasize on technology, organizations are moving towards digital, omnichannel workflow systems to offer seamless customer experience. Furthermore, organizations are adapting to the modern software development process like DevOps to improve the digital workflow system. This kind of development process works on highly complex and unified systems that are driven by specified APIs, GUIs, AI, ML, and other Cloud-driven applications. To ensure the speed, quality, accuracy, and consistency of these systems, test automation plays an essential role.

To sustain and succeed in today’s highly competitive world, organizations are optimizing their workflow testing strategy to suit the modern application development practices and DevOps implementations. Such test executions are an important part for successful digital transformation.

Changes required for test automation in digital transformation scenario:

  • Focus on business tests
  • Emphasize on continuous testing
  • Improving processes with test automation
  • AI integration

Focus on business tests

Workflow operations are directly linked to business outcomes. Incorporation of digitization in the workflow systems are important for greater execution and enhanced customer experience; thus, allowing companies to build new workflow testing strategy to improve the performance of the entire process.

With digitization, the role of test teams has undergone a major transformation. Testers are not required to manually write the codes for all the process that is being developed. The QA process has been automated to handle complex business operations like real-time performance, interacting with other applications, flexible to the user preference, and a lot more. Businesses understand and develop test execution based on their requirements.

Emphasize on continuous testing

Digital workflows demand tools and concepts that deliver faster, accurate, and consistent results. CI/CD (continuous Integration/continuous delivery) practice is the most preferred among the developers for the speed, quality, and ease it offers. The success of the CI/CD process also lies in expanding the scope/coverage of the software testing efforts and the proverbial -shift-left testing. Continuous testing is bringing a testers mindset of questioning/ enquiry in early/all parts of the product development cycle. This enables the testers to identify any issues at an early stage in the development process and allows developers to fix the issues early which will further enable an easy and smooth development process with accurate end results.  This is achieved by questioning and revalidating assumptions (documented or undocumented) and establishing cause-effect relationships between varied parts of your development efforts. 

Improving processes with test automation

Digital workflows and test automation work hand-in-hand. The success of a digital workflow system lies in automating the testing process. Manual testing, while being highly effective, is tedious, time-consuming, and often prone to a number of errors.  A judicious mix of manual and automated testing should be applied to achieve maximum coverage and error-discovery.

As discussed earlier, digital workflows need continuous testing process to ensure the quality of the system. Continuous testing can be achieved only by test automation solutions. Test automation are implemented to conduct end-to-end workflow testing that includes test creation, processing, execution, test data generation, test data and environment management, running test suites, security testing, and generating reports.

Though test automation can provide reliability, accuracy, and consistency, it is essential to identify the right test tool. In the event of failing to do so, the anticipated time and effort savings can be lost in building and maintaining automation scripts. In critical digital workflows, testers create smaller regression suites and run the test; the results are analyzed, and problems are reported to the developer.

AI integration

AI and ML integration are offering new possibilities for test automations. AI has increased the speed of test automation by multiple folds, this is achieved by applying complex algorithms running in the backend of the AI-integrated system. AI-integration is still at a nascent stage, organizations are exploring different possibilities to use them for automation of different digital processes. AI testing are used to test application usability, features, integrations, and test data analysis. Furthermore, AI-driven test automation allows the machine tor self-learning and taking proactive actions with minimal or no human intervention.

Digital workflow testing for early issue identification in DevOps

DevOps practices are popularly used for application development in the modern world. Test automation helps them to identify and resolve issues at an early stage of software development lifecycle. Without a digital QA strategy, test automation can help to remove the barriers of the digital processes.

Digital-driven software development are the modern processes that are backed by powerful QA system. Implementing test automation practices right from the beginning of the DevOps cycle will adapt a true shift left attitude and perform the test activity with utmost precision. While test automation has distinct benefits, it requires careful planning supported by the right skillset to achieve the desired ROI.  Hence, it requires testers to reskill to fit in the modern digital scenario.

Yethi’s QA solutions to modern workflow systems

Yethi is a QA service provider for banks and financial institutions across the world. Yethi test automation tool, Tenjin, is a 6th generation, robotic test automation platform that is capable of handling diverse workflow applications. With successful testing of inexhaustible workflow systems in the past for our esteemed clients, having us placed as one of the top QA testing solutions for financial software systems.

Tenjin is capable of providing effortless test automation with reduced time. It specializes in handling automation of continuous integration/ continuous development processes to keep in sync with the development process, thereby, ensuring to fix the issues as they are detected. It further helps in end-to-end testing of all workflow stages, strategizing, analyzing and designing test cases, executing and monitoring entire workflow stages and process. Tenjin’s multiple rounds of test execution to offer accurate test results even under high-risk scenarios make us the perfect QA partner. We carry out thorough analysis and testing to achieve specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely results/