Continuous Testing Report

Dublin, 28th May 2019 - Last week we hosted our Continuous Testing breakfast briefing with Antoine Aymer. We had some great discussions during the morning, with Antoine outlining the importance of Continuous Testing throughout the whole software development lifecycle. Many questions were raised, and for me there were three main takeaways from the session: 

1. In-sprint and model-based testing are crucial enablers of Continuous Testing

It was clear from Antoine’s presentation and his experience working with clients that model-based testing (MBT) has been the strongest lever for companies to successfully move to continuous testing. Encouragingly, the report shows that there is increasing interest around model-based testing (MBT) with 30% of respondents foreseeing themselves using model-based testing in the coming year. MBT provides for the automatic generation of test artifacts, as well as the flexibility to adapt to changing requirements using automated requirement change processes.
 
We also see increasing interest around in-sprint testing. The idea behind in-sprint testing is very simple – to complete all testing activities inside the development sprint. This means that you need to write and communicate the correct requirements and generate testing artefacts, all within the same development sprint.

2. There are significant gaps in the adoption of test automation

A positive move towards continuous testing has been the adoption of test automation for various QA tasks along with the move towards agile and DevOps. However, we are seeing that the test automation landscape is scattered, fragmented, and lacks orchestration. Because of this, gaps still exist. For example, the report shows that on average only 25% of test data is generated using test data tools and only 24% of performance test cases and 24% of end-to-end business scenarios are executed using test automation tools. These gaps ultimately slow down the entire process.

3. Test environment and Test data provisioning are the key challenges for Continuous Testing 

It was very interesting to hear that the majority of companies globally are finding the biggest bottlenecks to Continuous Testing are in the areas of test data and test environments, as we are seeing this in the Irish market also. The main challenges with this are getting the right test data on time and getting the right coverage of end-user expectations and requirements in the test set.

If you have any questions about the report or you would like to find out about how Continuous Testing can help your business, please feel free to contact me or Carol Murphy.

Download a free copy of the report here. 

Will Murray

Head of Digital Assurance & Testing