We know how smartphones have impacted the lives of millennials across the globe. This is due to the popularity of mobile apps which ensures convenient lifestyles. But the growing demands and the expectations of users have forced the organizations to develop softwares that is faster, comprehensive and dynamic.
The need of Continuous testing for efficient Mobile App Development and What is Continuous testing.
In the Mobile app industry technology is evolving rapidly. So to be in the game organizations need to come up with technological solutions which are faster, qualitative and convenient. Gone are the days when we used waterfall models for software testing. Nowadays most of the organizations follow Agile development and DevOps Culture for quickening the development cycle. Agile methodology allows teams to carry out software development throughout SDLC so that the bugs can get detected in the early stages of development, and developers can fix them immediately, on the other hand DevOps focuses on enabling testing at every stage of the lifecycle which strengthens the build quality while continuous delivery amplifies the speed of deployment enabling faster app releases.
What is Continuous testing ?
In a nutshell development teams are making use of advanced technologies which would help them deliver more innovative and improved versions of applications at a faster rate.
In a traditional environment, testing is done in the later stages of the development cycles. However, nowadays most of the companies are moving towards Devops and Continuous delivery models in which software is constantly in development inorder to deliver ready to deploy softwares , so leaving testing until the end no longer works. That’s where continuous testing comes into picture to ensure qualitative results at every stage of the development. When you commit a hot-fix or a release through a CI/CD pipeline, you need to make sure that there are no regression defects that might hamper your Production environment. Doing so manually can take a considerable amount of time. conHence the process needs to be automated to get faster and qualitative results.So we can say that automation is the building block for continuous testing. Now when we talk about automation in continuous testing there are some important terms that we need to take into account.
Two types of Automation in testing
Particularly in the world of Continuous testing there are two types of testing i.e. Automation testing and Test Automation
Automation testing is the act of conducting test cases with the help of some software tools in an automated fashion as opposed to manual testing. On the other hand test automation refers to automating the process of tracking and managing the different tests.
Why is Test Automation Crucial in Continuous Testing
Test automation is nothing but the process of tracking and managing the different tests throughout the ci/cd development cycle. Managing all the testing needs in a continuous testing environment is a huge task. It requires tremendous communication efforts in tracking which environment has deployed a new code, when each piece needs testing and how those requirements integrate back into the moving process of continuously delivering software .
Test automation reduces the burden of tracking and managing all those testing needs like when and what type of testing is required in the ongoing development cycle. In doing so, test automation ensures that a high quality of testing is maintained at all the points throughout the development pipeline. In addition it also allows the testers to focus more time and effort in creating effective test cases thus improving the effectiveness of the testing as the testers are no longer putting efforts in solving the minitia of testing needs required throughout the development lifecycle.
Conclusion
Continuous testing is a high tech practise which guarantees both faster and qualitative results, when implemented in a ci/cd pipeline. In order to undergo continuous testing successfully we need to implement test automation thoroughly to diminish all the loopholes in the development cycle, to guarantee a bug free application.Most of the app testing platforms are switching to continuous testing as a major practice for quality analysis and pCloudy is one of them. pCloudy is a cloud based mobile application testing platform which considers continuous testing as a major technology practice to deliver high quality applications. It is integrated with various automation testing tools and frameworks like Appium, Jenkins, Bamboo etc. and fosters the continuous testing practice in order to deliver high quality applications
