What are the biggest challenges to testing in a continuous delivery environment?

Continuous delivery (CD) is a key practice in agile methodologies that aims to deliver software products faster and more reliably. CD involves automating and streamlining the processes of building, testing, and deploying software, so that changes can be released to users frequently and with minimal risk. However, CD also poses some significant challenges to testing, especially in terms of quality, speed, and collaboration. In this article, we will explore some of the biggest challenges to testing in a continuous delivery environment, and suggest some possible solutions.

1 Quality assurance

One of the main challenges to testing in a CD environment is ensuring that the software meets the quality standards and expectations of the users and stakeholders. Since CD involves releasing software more often and with less manual intervention, there is less time and opportunity for thorough testing and feedback. This increases the risk of introducing defects, errors, or inconsistencies that can affect the functionality, performance, or usability of the software. To overcome this challenge, testers need to adopt a shift-left approach, which means testing early and often in the development cycle, and using techniques such as test-driven development, behavior-driven development, and acceptance test-driven development. These techniques help testers to align their tests with the user requirements, business goals, and acceptance criteria, and to ensure that the software delivers value to the users.

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Sagar Shah PMP® CSM®

LinkedIn Top Agile Voice | Technology Evangelist | IT Consultant | Agile Mentor | Digital Transformation | Prompt Engineering | SAFe - Scaled Agile Framework | Pre-Sales Consultant | RFP Specialist | 10K+ Followers
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The biggest challenges to testing in a continuous delivery environment include managing automated test suites, ensuring sufficient test coverage, dealing with rapidly changing codebases, and addressing the need for both speed and quality in testing processes. Balancing these aspects is crucial for maintaining the effectiveness of testing practices in a continuous delivery setting.

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2 Speed and efficiency

Another challenge to testing in a CD environment is achieving speed and efficiency without compromising quality. Since CD requires testing to be done continuously and in parallel with development, testers need to be able to execute their tests quickly and reliably, and to provide feedback and results as soon as possible. This means that testers need to automate as much of their testing as possible, using tools and frameworks that support CD pipelines, such as Jenkins, Selenium, Cucumber, and TestNG. Automation also helps testers to reduce the manual effort and human error involved in testing, and to increase the coverage and consistency of their tests. However, automation is not a silver bullet, and testers still need to perform some manual testing, especially for exploratory, usability, and user experience testing. Therefore, testers need to balance automation and manual testing, and to prioritize and optimize their test cases based on the risk and value of each feature or change.

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3 Collaboration and communication

A third challenge to testing in a CD environment is fostering collaboration and communication among the testers, developers, and other stakeholders involved in the software delivery process. Since CD involves frequent and incremental changes, testers need to be aware of the latest updates and requirements, and to coordinate their testing activities and feedback with the developers and the users. This means that testers need to adopt a cross-functional and collaborative mindset, and to use tools and methods that facilitate communication and transparency, such as agile boards, chat platforms, code reviews, and pair testing. Collaboration and communication also help testers to share their knowledge and skills, to learn from each other, and to improve their testing practices.

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4 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?

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Shawon Barua

Full stack QA | Agile | Test Automation | Performance | API Test | Cloud Environment | Container | CI/CD | Web,Mobile,Desktop project experience| Data Sceince Enthusiastic
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The challenges that come to testing CD development practice is : > Testing in every sprint and frequently switching context > Writing automation test timely, as feature progress so do automation has to progress > Time, another big factor, as sometimes all the feature testable at the same time But all this can be made more bearable with team collaboration, proper planning and time maintaining. Adopting shift left approach and gaining knowledge before actual testing comes and giving feedback. And in agile approach when team collaborate all things became more easy.

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David J. Ferrick

⳩ • FinTech Innovation • Government Operations • Veteran Acumen (CLSSBB, DASM, MOS Expert)
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One of the primary challenges of testing in a continuous delivery environment is the pace at which new and innovative ideas emerge, even within an existing delivery framework. This rapid innovation can often disrupt established testing processes. However, the beauty of being agile is the flexibility it offers to adapt and evolve in real-time. In contrast, more rigid methodologies like Six Sigma might find it harder to accommodate such swift changes.

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What are the biggest challenges to testing in a continuous delivery environment?

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2

3

4

1 Quality assurance

2 Speed and efficiency

3 Collaboration and communication

4 Here’s what else to consider

Agile Methodologies

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What are the biggest challenges to testing in a continuous delivery environment?

1

2

3

4

1 Quality assurance

2 Speed and efficiency

3 Collaboration and communication

4 Here’s what else to consider

Agile Methodologies

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