Software testing, as people know, is a complex matter. As the software progresses through its development cycle, possible bugs and complications develop alongside it, which, noticed too late, can dilute time and costs. The solution? Continuous testing.
Continuous testing is a practice designed to ensure software quality by detecting errors and critical issues at all stages of the development and deployment pipeline, with the goal of reducing release times and correction costs. It therefore assumes a crucial role for a company adopting an Agile and DevOps approach, enabling it to overcome the possible contradiction between rapid software releases and the quality of the user experience for which it is intended.
The benefits of adopting continuous testing
There are several different advantages of continuous testing:
- it speeds up software development, both through the introduction of automated testing and by allowing tests to be conducted concurrently with development;
- it reduces costs, since the early detection and correction errors is much less costly than it would be in a production environment;
- it improves the quality of software, in part because of the ability to maintain code consistency across projects;
- it enables team collaboration, due to the increased visibility it contributes to by operating at all stages of development;
- it improves the customer experience, by resolving problems detected before releasing the software into the production environment.
How do we adopt continuous testing successfully?
How do we introduce continuous testing into the software development cycle conveniently and effectively?
When adopting this methodology in your company, you may run into some critical issues. For example, the necessary skills for optimizing test design are not always present in the company. Another tricky point may be the difficulty in managing test data. Finally, you must be able to ensure that the process is orchestrated properly, which is critical to the success of continuous testing.
Testing as a service can be an effective remedy to overcome the lack or inadequacy of testing activities conducted in-house. Even without complete outsourcing, it can in fact enable development teams to detect defects early on in the production cycle and outsource frequent and repetitive tasks.
Continuous testing: the advantages of relying on crowdtesting
One step beyond delegating an ongoing testing activity can come from choosing a partner that uses crowdtesting, as UNGUESS does. There are many examples of crowdsourced software testing that highlight the effectiveness of this methodology in achieving better results than traditional tools, in a shorter time frame and at a lower cost.
UNGUESS, in particular, makes use of testers, selected from within a profiled community, who test the operation of applications in a real-world environment, in end-to-end logic, for a variety of devices and operating systems. The fresh eye approach also makes it possible to detect bugs that those who develop or already know the software may well miss.
The process becomes even easier and more efficient by integrating crowdtesting with your company's preferred developer tools. In this way, if a tester finds a bug and reports it on the UNGUESS platform, having obtained approval from the test manager, the criticality will be displayed in real time on the tools that developers use every day.
How do we overcome critical issues arising from security?
Security is an additional challenge in all phases of development that continuous testing cannot overlook. A recent report by Sonatype points out, for example, that one in every eight downloads of open source software contains known vulnerabilities. The situation is probably worse for proprietary software.
However, timely verification of the code to ensure the quality of the software also in terms of security has often unaffordable costs, both for software houses and for the companies that use it.
One effective response is bug bounty programs, which rely on ethical hackers to hunt down these vulnerabilities before the attackers do, so that they can remedy them in time. It is an effective tool, but one that requires specialized skills, tools and resources that companies often lack. Here again we can come to your aid: thanks to the UNGUESS SECURITY platform, we connect companies with a large community of ethical hackers.
In conclusion, continuous testing certainly brings many benefits, in terms of software quality, release time and cost. But, to be successfully implemented, it requires skills and organization that only a qualified partner like UNGUESS can provide.