Test Automation: The Focal Point Of Ci/cd Workflow

By Author: TomWade
Total Articles: 34
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In today’s hyper-competitive market of technology, it is an advantage to have a competitive edge. This pushes organizations to adopt development techniques which help to establish the practice of continuous integration and continuous delivery. Continuous Integration calls for code integration into a shared repository many times in a day, while continuous delivery enables the delivery of usable build to the user.
The main challenge for software professional is to deliver a good idea to people as soon as possible. The traditional waterfall method is inadequate to achieve this goal, hence organizations are adopting development techniques which support continuous integration and continuous delivery. A typical development pipeline is an implementation of the building, deployment, testing and release process of an application. For achieving CI/CD, it is recommended to automate this pipeline as much as possible. If concentrated enough on this pipeline, one will realize that test automation is a vital element in the process of continuous delivery. ...
... Hence, concentrating on test automation will help to establish a result oriented environment for CI/CD.
Automated Testing forms an integral part in continuous delivery. An organization has three options in order to select the right automation tool – to build an in-house automation framework, use an open source tool or purchase a premium test automation tool. Building an in-house automation tool is a time taking affair and a software project in itself. Purchasing premium tools can be an added investment without a guarantee on its ROI. So the best economic and technical approach is to leverage an open source tool. Among them, Appium and Selenium are ideal test automation solutions for mobile applications and web application respectively.
Automated Testing is all about using a special software to control test execution and compare the actual result with the desired results. For effective results it is important to select the right tool, framework and technical approach. The best approach is to understand which tests are to be automated and which are to be performed manually. As suggested by Mike Cohn, low-level unit tests need to be automated more than higher level end-to-end GUI tests. This is because unit tests verify and validate the initial source codes. Usability tests and one-off tests should be done manually. Selecting the right automated testing framework enables extension of test automation to larger projects. Whichever framework is chosen, it is important to keep the test script separate from the framework. This makes it easier to maintain and extend them later on.
Conclusion
Organizations striving for continuous delivery need to evolve their testing practices from an existing manual system to an increasingly automated one. Past the initial hurdles, the investment in automated testing is worthwhile. An ideal test automation solution can be based on Selenium and Appium which come without the burden of maintenance and manual configuration. Organizations investing their efforts on automated testing will eventually be the ones to establish a result oriented CI/CD workflow and will finally deliver quality products into the market.