Continuous testing isn’t optional anymore

“Continuous testing isn’t optional anymore” on SDTimes, July 3, 2020.

What’s holding companies back

Also holding companies back are legacy systems and their associated technical debt.

“If you’ve got a legacy application and let’s say there are 100 or more test cases that you run on that application, just in terms of doing regression testing, you’ve got to take all those test cases, automate them and then as you do future releases, you need to build the test cases for the new functionality or enhancements,” said Alan Zucker, founding principal of project management consultancy Project Management Essentials. “If the test cases that you wrote for the prior version of the application now are changed because we’ve modified something, you need to keep that stuff current.”

Service virtualization saves time

Service virtualization is another speed enhancer because one no longer waits for resources to be provisioned or competes with other teams for access to resources. One can simply mock-up what’s needed in a service virtualization tool.

“I remember working on a critical application one time where everything had gone great in test and then when we moved the application changes to prod, things ground to a halt because the configurations in the upper and lower environment differed,” said Project Management Essential’s Zucker. “With service virtualization that goes away.” Within the context of CT, service virtualization can kick off automatically, triggered by a developer pushing a feature out to a branch.