In today's competitive environment, software-driven businesses are looking for ways to consistently deliver good quality products and address changes based on customer experience and feedback. To ensure the Engineering teams are catering to the needs of business and the customers, they need to respond to changes quickly and swiftly. At the same time, they need to ensure the changes are not impacting existing features. For this to be achievable, Silo-based testing is inefficient. Therefore, product features need accurate testing to cut across the application layers for end-to-end coverage. Agile Engineering helps cater to the business needs; it helps bring in testing right at the beginning of the development cycle; "Shift-Left" is! Waterfall.
Injecting testing throughout is difficult! And that is where continuous testing and integration with the development pipeline helps and results in a continuous feedback loop. Modern-day applications and products are built for multiple platforms, the Supportability matrix is vast, and there is an excess in the choices available for platforms. Multi/Cross-platform testing needs to be performed to determine the behavior in different environments. This helps in identifying issues that may vary with platforms or configurations, such as:
- Consistency
- User interface
- Usability
- Performance issues
Below parameters play an important role in defining the Multi-Platform Test strategy for the product and help deliver the software to customers' hands sooner rather than faster!
- Knowledge about Users
- Platform Support
- How much needs to be tested
- Test Automation
Test Automation plays a crucial role in achieving Continuous testing, and framework choices play a critical role in quicker integrations with the CI pipeline to obtain feedback in near real-time. Continuous testing does not require any specific type of testing approach (e.g., shift left, shift right, etc.) or testing tools. However, it does require that:
- Actionable feedback is delivered to the right stakeholder at the right time.
- Testing across all layers of the software product.
- Testing occurs across all phases of the software delivery pipeline.
For predictable outcomes and ROI from the Continuous testing strategy, the Test Automation suite needs to follow the design and coding principles, ensuring ease of maintenance, smarter execution, and increased ROI. For this, the design and coding principles also need to cover various aspects such as:
- Smart Insights | Dashboard along with detailed execution results.
- Faster Than Fastest | Execute more tests per instance and automate tests faster.
- Seamless Integration | With the CI/CD pipeline.
- Multi-Platform Support | Span tests across varied platforms.
Once Continuous testing is in place, the engineering team needs to monitor different parameters and map them to compare the results and derive the ROI "Before-After" be it Lead Time for Changes, Test data creation, Test execution rate, and so on.