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Evolving from Automated to Continuous Testing for DevOps

Copyright © 1996-2015 Parasoft www.parasoft.com

Evolving from Automated to Continuous Testing for DevOpsThe evolution of enterprise agile or lean practices such as DevOps has stemmed from the business demanding more, differentiable software. With this need for speed, we cannot assume that yesterday’s practices can meet today’s demands. Moreover, there needs to be a cultural shift from testing an application to understanding the risks associated with a release candidate. This gap challenges most organizations today.

Speeding up any process or system inevitably exposes constraints—software quality is no exception. Since testing is a time-boxed event executed at the end of the cycle, accelerating the software release cycle reduces the time originally allotted for testing. If increasing the release cadence is the desired outcome, the software quality process needs to be re-engineered.

Traditionally, organizations have taken a bottom-up approach to testing, adding incremental tests for new functionality. While this will always be required, the mindset needs to shift to embrace both a bottom-up and a top-down approach. A top-down approach can inject assessments of desired business outcomes and business risks into the quality process, fi ne tuning the test scope and increasing its overall relevance to the enterprise.

What is needed today is not only more automation, but also a method in which the tests constructed indicate the probability of business failure—not simply a test pass/fail report. This is a fundamental shift in the quality management culture.

In addition to the cultural alignment of business risks to the software quality process, it is important to move beyond just measuring the tests to viewing the outcome of the tests associated with business risk. It is critical to consider measuring the quality of the process itself. This is where organizations that are investing in DevOps initiatives will truly see the greatest return on their investment.

Continuous Testing emphasizes continuous process improvement. While test automation provides the critical ‘sensors’ for detecting software defects, Continuous Testing highlights process improvements that can prevent future defects from occurring.

Copyright © 1996-2015 Parasoft www.parasoft.com

Continuous Testing brings real-time assessments, objective go/no go quality gates, and continuous measurements to refi ne the development process so that business expectations are continuously met. The outcome is a perpetual containment strategy that prevents the leakage of defects to downstream, expensive remediation efforts.

Continuous Testing resets the question from ‘are you done testing?’ to ‘is the level of risk understood and accepted?’ Parasoft’s Continuous Testing model helps enterprise software developers cover all of their bases from test environment access, to risk assessment and policy analysis, to requirements traceability, advanced analysis and test optimization.

Collectively, Parasoft’s automated software quality solutions prevent and detect risks associated with application failure.

With a sharp focus on DevOps and a comprehensive suite of software development solutions, Parasoft reduces the time, effort and cost of delivering secure, reliable and compliant software for the majority of Fortune 500 companies.

For more information on Parasoft’s DevOps solutions

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