Today’s complex software industry, driven by evolving customer demands, intense competition, and global shifts, necessitates that businesses gain a competitive edge by delivering fast, high-quality product releases. This makes frequent releases a critical objective for all companies, from startups to enterprises. However, achieving this can take years, especially for large corporations, due to challenges in culture, technology, and the time-consuming testing process.

Continuous Testing helps companies manage these complexities. It involves automating tests throughout the software delivery pipeline to get immediate feedback on release risks. Essentially, it aims to build quality into the product from the start of the development lifecycle. This approach pushes teams to adapt their culture, mindset, and technical practices to enable testing at all development stages (Unit, Integration, Security, System, and Acceptance testing), thereby accelerating the overall development process and improving customer outcomes. While crucial for competitive advantage, Continuous Testing does present inherent complexities and challenges worth considering before implementation.

Challenge 1: Integrate a new mindset into an existing methodology

Before Continuous Testing integrated with DevOps, development teams faced a significant mindset shift. I’ve seen organizations struggle or fail this transition due to poor communication. People naturally resist drastic change, especially like that brought by Continuous Testing.

To succeed, you need to communicate the “why” and the benefits of the change to your teams. Emphasize how learning new technologies and tools will ultimately improve the product for customers. Crucially, allow your teams time to adapt; avoid rushing them until you’re confident they’re on board.

Challenge 2: Instead of asking “Are we automating enough?”, the focus has shifted

Before continuous testing became the norm in cloud-based (SaaS) development, organizations focused on reducing testing efforts, especially manual testing. The main question was, “Are we automating enough?” While effective then, this approach needs reevaluation. Massively automated, unstructured test suites quickly become unmanageable, taking longer to maintain than to test. Plus, organizations can’t run them continuously per fix or build, defeating the purpose of automation.

So what’s changed? We now need to act fast and prioritize tests that yield the highest return on investment. Automating everything simply isn’t practical. For instance, I used to give my teams a simple checklist to help them decide what to automate. They eventually embraced this as an ongoing process, making the checklist unnecessary.

Challenge 3: Continuous testing extends beyond just testing

Continuous testing isn’t just about testing. While testing is central, several other areas are involved in the process, and we need to focus on them to maximize continuous testing’s benefits.

Challenge 4: Inaccurate test signals

Plan your rollbacks carefully. Even with the best continuous testing and CI/CD practices, production crashes can happen. Always back up your data before deploying changes to be ready for the worst. This allows for immediate rollback to the previous production version and a new software testing round to validate the application. Remember, a production rollback necessitates a thorough examination of the entire pipeline and all test environments to ensure no loose ends, preventing repeated release cycle delays.

Challenge 5: Inefficient resource use

Effective and scalable Continuous Testing demands significant investment in resources, infrastructure, frameworks, and personnel. Unless carefully managed and tracked, this can become extremely expensive. For example, daily Continuous Delivery (CD) processes utilize numerous servers (physical and virtual), consuming resources that quickly add up, especially with cloud providers like Azure or AWS.

Engineering teams must prevent wasting these valuable resources on failed job executions due to poor coding and testing. This is particularly crucial for startups or low-budget projects. Therefore, it’s essential to continuously monitor the CD execution pipeline to identify and address areas of resource waste.

Canarys enables you to stay ahead of your peers in business

Continuous testing is intertwined with other significant shifts, such as the increasing adoption of cloud services (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS) and our fast-paced society. Therefore, organizations should embrace continuous testing in some form, either through technical implementation or by adopting specific principles.