Level: Introductory
As you increasingly rely on technology to improve the quality and efficiency of your personal and professional lives, software has become the key business differentiator. Organizations must release software faster, as well as ensure the safety, security, and reliability of their applications. The option to make trade-offs between time and quality no longer exists. Software teams must deliver quality and speed. To meet these expectations, businesses have shifted from more traditional approaches of delivering software to a more rapid iterative release and delivery approach.
Accelerating any business process, however, exposes systemic constraints that shackle the entire organization to its slowest moving component. In the case of the accelerated SDLC, testing has become the most significant barrier to taking full advantage of iterative approaches to software development. For organizations to leverage these transformative development strategies, they must shift from test automation to continuous testing. Drawing a distinction between test automation and continuous testing may seem like an exercise in semantics, but the gap between automating a functional test and executing a continuous testing process is substantial.
You will learn:
- What the shift from automated to continuous testing actually means and why it's critical for DevOps
- How disruptive changes in software complexity, such as the emergence of the API economy, require the reinvention of testing
- How technologies like service virtualization, automated API testing, and test environment management enable the transformation from "automated" to "continuous"