Many people confuse continuous testing with test automation. That makes sense, because you cannot do continuous testing without automated tests. But it is much more. Continuous testing has a higher-level maturity that could require a totally different way of working—but it also gives a faster path to production.
Adam Auerbach is the Vice President of Quality Engineering at EPAM Systems, a leading global provider of digital platform engineering and software development services. Before joining Epam, Adam served as the VP of Quality and DevOps Engineering at Lincoln Financial Group where Adam was responsible introducing and leading the DevOps and Quality Engineering transformation across Technology. Prior to joining Lincoln, Adam was the senior director of technology for advanced testing and release services at Capital One Financial Corporation. While at Capital One, he provided leadership for the agile transformation of their quality assurance group and led the enterprise adoption of DevOps and Continuous Testing.
All Stories by Adam Auerbach
The toughest part of a DevOps transformation is the cultural changes required to make it successful, so to accelerate your transformation, figure out what they are as soon as possible. Explore your company's attitude toward innovation and the tools you have and how you use them, and it will make the change easier.
Testers today need to look more like developers than users. Automation is becoming essential, so understanding at least basic programming is a must. As companies adopt agile and deliver more frequently, modern testers should learn to code, understand continuous integration, and use tools to eliminate constraints.
When you start down the road to continuous testing, even if you increase speed, performance tests can still hold up production deployments. By using application monitoring, service virtualization, and open source performance testing tools, performance testing is accounted for in every cycle of development.
As the streamlined DevOps movement catches on, more and more companies are abandoning “traditional testers” and getting software developers to test. Testers are not becoming obsolete—but it means testers have to evolve and start ensuring that quality is baked in. Adam Auerbach details how they need to change.
The DevOps movement accelerates the delivery of high-quality features to customers. While that's great, there is a ton of work required to make it happen, with a high change curve to overcome—and perhaps the most critical change is to the way the developer works. Here's why this disruption is necessary.
With the DevOps movement and push for continuous delivery, the way we have done test automation in the past must evolve. In continuous testing, tests are run as part the build pipeline so that every check-in and deployment is validated. Learn more to ensure your team can achieve continuous testing.