Automation – the default practice

Making automation a default and implicit practice in an agile and DevOps environment helps in ensuring the following:

• The existing functionality, if broken by any new code check-in, is called out and reported immediately
• The developer is notified and is required to fix it as it happens
• The coverage of testing grows as the existing functionality gets validated by automated scripts on daily and nightly builds
• The test team can focus on validating new functionality, thus, increasing the velocity of development

While TDD, ATDD, BDD, and service virtualization, all focus on the inside-out view of testing, the test-after approach calls for parallel independent testing that looks at the outside-in aspect of the software.

To ensure that the pace and quality of agile development and testing is maintained in a DevOps implementation framework, refer to the following points:

• Automated execution of a minimal set of features in every testable build is advised
• The functionality of the system can be automated using tools such as Selenium, HP Unified Functional Tester, Eggplant, and more
• The order and priority of features to be automated, when aligned with the iteration and the release plan, will ensure high returns on investment

For instance, if the User Registration Form feature is required to proceed to perform further actions in an application, it would be advisable to automate the feature, include positive and negative scenarios, and execute them on all the released builds. This would ensure that the existing feature is not broken and is tested through automation, and thus, the test team can continue to test the rest of the released and dependent features. This induces confidence about the quality of the software/application under development.

A continuous practice of building executable automation code for prioritized features along with the APIs and services test code and integrating this automated code with the CI server saves time on deployment and execution and, therefore, provides high ROI and reduced time to market. Take a look at the following diagram: