Software testing continuous deployment tutorials and videos

Test Automation Best Practices That You Might Not Be Following in Your Daily Testing Routine

Software Testing Magazine — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 14:39:05 +0000

Effective test automation can improve the quality and reliability of your product or service. This article discusses test automation best practices, from selecting the right tools and integrating CI/CD pipelines to prioritizing tests and maintaining script relevancy through regular reviews and refactoring. Choosing Specific Tools with Predefined Clear Requirements The way you choose the right test automation – nothing might be more important. To start, consider the specific requirements of your project, such as the type of apps you’re working on – whether it’s web, mobile, desktop, or API – and the technology stack involved. Of course, you must understand the kinds of testing you’ll need to perform, including unit, integration, performance, etc. Is the ease of use important? Absolutely yes, the level of how easy it will be for you and your team to learn and use the tool is really important especially considering changing conditions on the test automation market and involving more and more non-technical specialists into QA processes. Look for documentation and consider the level of vendor support. Scalability is vital as well. Your chosen tool should handle an increased workload as your project grows and support parallel execution to speed up the testing process. Maintaining and updating test scripts should be as easy as can be. And money, the stumbling block of almost all choices. Evaluate the licensing fees and consider the long-term costs. Don’t forget that in the real world, you may not need the most expensive tool, just one of the really good [...]

The post Test Automation Best Practices That You Might Not Be Following in Your Daily Testing Routine first appeared on Software Testing Magazine.

TestOps Infrastructure from Beginning to End: Theoretical and Technical Aspects

Software Testing Magazine — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 17:55:33 +0000

The creation of a TestOps infrastructure is a demanding task. TestOps (or test operations) refers to the discipline of managing the operational aspects of testing within the software delivery lifecycle. In this article, we focus on theoretical and technical aspects, and discuss some case studies to consider. Author: Maksim Sarychau, Test Automation Solution Architect and QA Engineering Manager at Solvd Theoretical aspects In the first part of this article, we discuss test maintainability based on Object Oriented Programming (OOP) best practices, how to keep automation results transparent for management, and other theoretical aspects of TestOps infrastructure. Reaching all platforms Increasingly, customers demand a cross-platform solution. From Web, Mobile, AI, to gaming consoles, a wider array of clients means considering all platforms. In order to make your tests truly integrated, you can use an all-in-one open-source solution called Carina. If you prefer, you can use any framework you want, though using a more complex solution will save time and money. Testing Maintainability When it comes to test maintainability, you should adhere to the main practices and good projecting patterns that are based on object-oriented programming. Using page objects for functional testing is a trending practice. However, these tests are difficult to maintain; look outside of the ‘proof-of-concept’ aspect for a clearer overview. Pro-tip: use an abstraction of UI for mobile automation with iOS and Android. In this way, you can reuse source code without having to make drastic changes to it. Using page objects and UI components should be done as much as possible [...]

The post TestOps Infrastructure from Beginning to End: Theoretical and Technical Aspects first appeared on Software Testing Magazine.

Building Better Software Faster with Continuous Delivery Pipelines

Software Testing Magazine — Thu, 28 Jul 2022 15:41:21 +0000

A delivery pipeline is a set of automated processes that allow developers and DevOps professionals to efficiently compile, build, test and deploy their code to their production platforms. It most common components of a pipeline are build automation/continuous integration, test automation and deploy automation. Deployment Pipelines are central to a Continuous Delivery approach. They represent an organizing principle for the automation of large parts of our development and deliver process. We optimize for fast, clear feedback to help sustain a software development team ability to make progress with high confidence. Like many ideas that become well-known, they are often misinterpreted. A Deployment Pipeline is much more than your build script, it is more specific than that, It is much more than an automated deployment tool. A Deployment Pipeline is the definitive statement on the releasability of your software in a DevOps approach. The key objective of a Software Delivery Pipeline is automation with no manual steps or changes required in or between any steps of the pipeline. Human error can and does occur when carrying out these boring and repetitive tasks manually and ultimately does affect the ability to meet deliverables and potentially SLAs due to botched deployments. Video producer: https://gotocph.com/

The post Building Better Software Faster with Continuous Delivery Pipelines first appeared on Software Testing Magazine.

Are Your CI/CD Pipelines Secure?

Software Testing Magazine — Tue, 21 Sep 2021 19:25:56 +0000

Angel Rivera of CircleCI discusses common pain points in properly securing applications, CI/CD pipelines and protecting sensitive access gates to integration targets. You will learn strategies to secure their applications, sensitive data and DevOps pipeline integration points. Most CI/CD pipelines used by DevOps teams utilize integrations with services such as APIs, databases and other critical systems to complete their workflows. These integrations usually required the use of extremely sensitive secrets such as passwords, tokens or certificates and must be securely protected at all times. Unauthorized access of these pipeline secrets open these systems to threats from bad actors and illegal access of data. Video producer: https://www.jfokus.com

The post Are Your CI/CD Pipelines Secure? first appeared on Software Testing Magazine.

Building a New Testing Culture

Software Testing Magazine — Tue, 24 Aug 2021 13:14:39 +0000

This presentation discusses the deprecating of simplicity due to increased speed of delivering of features in a complex software architecture and the rise of continuous verification as a new software testing culture using a chaos engineering approach. When engineering teams take on a new project, they often optimize for performance, availability, or fault tolerance. More experienced teams can optimize for these properties simultaneously. Now add an additional property: feature velocity. Organizations often try to optimize for feature velocity through process improvements and engineering hierarchy, but some optimize for feature velocity through explicit architectural decisions. These decisions increase the complexity of the system. This sounds like a trade-off: you get feature velocity, but for the price of increased complexity. Mental models of software architecture can help us understand the tension between these engineering properties. For example, understanding the distinction between accidental complexity and essential complexity can help you decide whether to invest engineering effort into simplifying your stack or expanding the surface area of functional output. Spoiler alert: most businesses prioritize feature velocity over simplification. Chaos Engineering was born within this conflict between feature velocity and increasing complexity. Rather than simplify, Chaos Engineering provides a mechanism for us to embrace the complexity and ride it like a familiar wave, maintaining our business priorities while dialing up feature velocity. Video producer: https://gotopia.eu/

The post Building a New Testing Culture first appeared on Software Testing Magazine.

Speed Up Software Testing and Fit in CI/CD

Software Testing Magazine — Mon, 21 Oct 2019 09:50:45 +0000

Faster software delivery through approaches like DevOps or Continuous Delivery impacts software testing practices. This article summarizes the steps that software testing teams can undertake in order to adapt to the fast development process in projects with Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD). Author: Andrei Mikhailau, ScienceSoft USA Corporation Organizations turn to DevOps and adopt Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines to speed up time to market and release high-quality software more frequently. The adoption of CI/CD inevitably affects software testing, as the testing process has to adapt to frequent code commits and shorter delivery cycles. However, according to the World Quality Report 2019, 43% of respondents name their software testing process to be too slow and unable to keep up with the pace of CI/CD-driven projects. In this article, we shed light on two approaches that help test teams speed up the testing process and remain efficient in projects with CI/CD pipelines. CI/CD implications on software testing The adoption of CI/CD pipelines affects software testing in two key ways. First, testing activities start at the initial stages of the software delivery life cycle, often as early as at the requirements’ analysis stage. Second, testing activities become nimbler. To satisfy these requirements, the testing process can be modified by: Building up an automated testing suit. Adopting test automation practices. Before we have an in-depth look at both activities, let’s clarify the notions. Automated testing means having software to execute test scripts covering functional test cases. Test automation, in its turn, is a broader [...]

The post Speed Up Software Testing and Fit in CI/CD first appeared on Software Testing Magazine.

How Spotify Test in Continuous Deployment

Software Testing Magazine — Wed, 26 Dec 2018 16:36:07 +0000

What kind of software testing do we need to have in a continuous deployment pipeline? What does it take to push a commit all the way to deployment? Fully automated. Several times a day. This is how Spotify does it. Model-based testing has played a key factor at Spotify as a part of the automated end-user acceptance testing. This talk presents how Spotify built the Continuous Deployment pipeline for its web player, and changed the way manual testing was performed previously. Also, the tools involved in this continuous deployment, which mostly are open source (Gerrit, Selenium, GraphWalker), will be discussed. Video producer: http://oredev.org/

The post How Spotify Test in Continuous Deployment first appeared on Software Testing Magazine.

Building Quality into Software Development

Software Testing Magazine — Mon, 12 Jun 2017 15:11:19 +0000

Scaling software development teams can sometimes be a problem for fast-growing startups. How can you keep the quality of the code when you start hiring more and more software developers. In his blog post “How to build quality into your software development workflow”, Sandeep Chouksey, VP of Engineering at Shutterstock, shares some experience on how his company tried manage quality in a continuous delivery context. The initial described by Sandeep Chouksey was rather good with continuous delivery process defined with Jenkins and supported by multiple end-to-end Selenium tests. He explains however that the situation becomes to deteriorate when the automated testing build with Selenium started to break and fail, stopping the delivery process. The issues were cause by the following reasons * Automated Selenium tests became the only form of software testing. Teams stopped writing unit tests. * The test framework was built and owned by the small QA team who was responsible to solve all issues. * The engineering organization didn’t pay attention to build a software development workflow that would support fast product development. * Quality was owned only by the QA team. To improve the situation, the organization needed to spread the ownership of software quality in different parts of the software development workflow, making sure that the right amount of software testing is performed in different levels of the development process. His conclusion is that “No matter how your company structures cadences for code releases, you need to emphasize quality in every step your development process. [...]

The post Building Quality into Software Development first appeared on Software Testing Magazine.