What you should know about Continuous Testing?

“Test early, test frequently” is one of the most crucial DevOps strategies. Functional testing should start with unit and integration tests as soon as possible. But performing non-functional testing is also crucial. Therefore, you need to conduct performance tests. You no longer have the luxury of delaying performance testing until all features are built as markets get more saturated every day. More teams realise the value of continuous testing, which has increased the popularity of continuous performance testing. Continuous testing on every code push eliminates the need for manual performance tests, which are time-consuming and expensive.

This post will define continuous performance testing, the benefits of continuous testing, and outline the tools you’ll need to implement it on your team.

What Is Continuous Performance Testing?

Continuous performance testing refers to continually monitoring an application’s performance while the load on that application is increased. Manually monitoring and performance testing in a testing environment is an option for teams. Still, this strategy is only feasible for modest-sized systems and on a smaller scale.

Performance testing is commonly utilized on large releases. Still, only a small percentage of teams incorporate it into their CI/CD pipeline as part of their DevOps process. However, continuous performance testing during the project’s development phase is strongly advised. Doing so requires a new set of tools to execute and scale automatically.

When most developers hear the phrase “performance testing,” they envision the following processes taken in the later phases of application development:

1. You start by listing all the crucial components that you wish to test.

2. After that, you write test scripts for performance testing in weeks.

3. You conduct the tests and then examine several pages of performance test results.

4. Performance testing’s presumption above was true in the past when companies used the waterfall development method for most applications.

However, times have certainly changed. Nowadays, most people no longer use the waterfall method. Instead, as agile software development has increased, the requirement for testing has changed. In addition, as more teams adopt DevOps techniques to create and distribute their apps, testing is now an integral element of the development process.

Early feedback from automated functional tests is crucial for improving code quality. Teams often employ automated testing to ensure that the application meets the functional requirements. However, looking at the non-functional criteria or system indicators like security, scalability, and performance is also crucial.

Every firm depends on its loyal clients. They may help a business expand its clientele, boost sales, and generate more revenue. Therefore, the process of developing software must include continuous performance testing.

What distinguishes it from regular performance testing?

Regular performance testing could occur as part of a release or at milestones rather than as a part of CI. However, it is possible to frequently incorporate continuous performance testing into each iteration.

Regular load testing focuses on how well a software version performs under pressure. Every new application version is tested continuously for the load to verify that it will function adequately during peak hours.

The entire build fails if a new application doesn’t satisfy the required performance criteria. After that, you need to check and resolve any performance problems in the most recent code. Continuous performance testing can validate code in pipelines for continuous deployment to ensure there are no application performance regressions. Once more, the goal is to be able to spot problems early and fix them without delay before they affect users or clients.

Continuous load testing is a wonderful concept for certain businesses. However, due to a lack of performance settings for different API versions and a lack of knowledge about traffic variations, it might be difficult to implement.

Benefits of continuous performance testing

There are several advantages to continuous testing. A summary of some continuous performance testing advantages is provided below.

Risk-Based Feedback

Continuous testing ensures software features are ready for use before they are released. In addition, tangible feedback assists managers and developers in finding and fixing notable flaws. 
Risk-based insights from automated solutions may cast a significantly broader support system for business risk coverage than traditional (and time-consuming) human testing.

Developers may make better design decisions right away with immediate feedback, which also provides managers with all the information they want to evaluate a release quickly.

Smarter Release Decisions

Agile, DevOps, and Continuous Delivery have reduced the time needed to plan, develop, and deploy software changes. Therefore, releases can occur daily or as rarely as once every two weeks.

It is becoming increasingly essential to employ automated testing to keep up with rapid release cycles to remain competitive and offer things customers want. However, a poorly considered release can cause more harm than gain if you don’t completely understand business risk.

Using a continuous testing tool and risk-based feedback, developers may select when and how to deploy new modifications. In addition, more and more companies are using automated solutions to balance the code’s complexity and the necessity for faster application delivery.

More Efficient Testing

Continuous testing helps managers and developers do the right tests at the right times. In addition, this enables them to decide if their delivery pipeline needs to move left or right.

Automated testing minimizes false positives and timeouts, which are common in conventional testing settings. In addition, when testing is conducted throughout the software development process, developers can be sure they are creating a framework that is both safe and highly versatile.

Redundancy is eliminated, and significant time is saved. Therefore, continuous testing ensures that software companies have the optimal architecture for the future expansion of their products, especially when users want new features.

More Stable User Experience

Continuous testing prevents software bugs from reaching consumers and disrupting their experience. Therefore, software developers must balance giving users the additional features they want and maintaining the smooth user experience they’ve enjoyed over time.

As software plays a major role in linking businesses with customers, one bad user experience might result in a financial disaster.

Thanks to intensive testing, every element of the user experience is kept in mind. This helps maintain a company’s image and brand after its software is prepared for showtime.

Integrated Teams

Continuous testing enables teams to collaborate effectively and efficiently across the development lifecycle. The days of transferring development code to segregated QA testers are long gone.

Teams are more connected and more aware of each pipeline stage since quality is evaluated throughout the whole software development cycle, not just at the end.

Software organizations today rely on continuous testing to guarantee that high-quality code is created from the moment development teams begin to code.

Continuous testing tools:

Continuous testing is one of the latest software delivery concepts brought in by the third wave of test automation. However, learning continuous testing is challenging, and selecting the best technology may be daunting.

Choosing the correct tool is crucial to your software testing and delivery success. The top eight continuous testing tools on the market right now are listed below. The automation tools like selenium, playwright, cypress, Katalon, JMeter, and K6 integrate with these CI/CD tools. We have evaluated each tool’s benefits and potential downsides according to criteria, such as the types of supported tests, learning curves, the programming language used, support for continuous testing, support for the CI/CD ecosystem, breakthrough features, and so on.

Jenkins

The central build and continuous integration occur on Jenkins, an open-source automation server. It is a standalone Java software providing packages for Windows, macOS, and other operating systems that resemble Unix. Jenkins facilitates software development projects’ construction, delivery, and automation and has hundreds of plugins.

Coming towards key features provided by Jenkins it has simple OS installation and upgrading criteria with a seamless user-friendly interface. Also, It has a large community-contributed plugin resource which makes it more extensible. As mentioned, it has a simple environment set up through the user interface. It supports master-slave architecture and distributed builds working with pre-build stages that use shells and windows command execution. It creates schedules using expressions and offers support for notifications about the development status.

CircleCI

A CI/CD technology called CircleCI promotes quick software development and publication. In addition, the user’s workflow may be automated using CircleCI, from code development through testing and deployment.

You may integrate CircleCI with GitHub, GitHub Enterprise, and Bitbucket to make builds when new code lines are committed. CircleCI also offers cloud-managed continuous integration hosting or uses local infrastructure that is protected by a firewall.

The notable traits of CircleCI include its integration power with GitHub Enterprise, Bitbucket, and GitHub. It uses a virtual machine or container to run the build and simply remove bugs. CircleCI supports automatic parallelizing. It supports rapid testing and allows branch-specific deployment which makes it very adaptable to any environment. It allows custom commands and automated merging for package uploading making it a great tool for customized testing.

TeamCity

The building management and continuous integration server JetBrains is called TeamCity.

A continuous integration tool called TeamCity aids in developing and deploying various project kinds. TeamCity interacts with Visual Studio and IDEs and operates in a Java context. The program supports.NET and open-stack applications and may be deployed on Windows and Linux systems.

New UI and direct connection with GitLab are features of TeamCity. Additionally, GitLab and Bitbucket server pull requests are supported. Finally, the release contains requests for AWS Spot Fleet, detection of Go tests, and token-based authentication.

TeamCity provides several options for reusing the settings and configurations of the parent project in the child project. The tool concurrently does parallel builds in various contexts. It allows you to run previous builds, see test history reports, pin, tag, and favorite builds. TeamCity makes it very simple to interact with, alter and expand the server. The tool ensures the CI server is operational and reliable. The main feature of TeamCity is it gives flexible user administration, user role assignments, a grouping of users, several user authentication methods, and a log of all user activity for full transparency of all server operations.

Testsigma

Testsigma is a new player in the test automation market. The software’s cloud-based solution supports web, mobile, and API test automation. In addition, it uses plain English for writing tests, which makes it easier for manual testers to pick up automation skills quickly.

For organizations with limited resources or complicated testing requirements, Testsigma also offers test infrastructure with the devices, operating systems, and browsers that work best. Testsigma uses AIs to help this practice as the testing industry moves to the left. The application uses AI to find possible threats and issues resulting from ongoing adjustments and alterations so that you can take quick action.

To increase Testsigma’s functionality, you may incorporate Java or Selenium using the custom function.

Popular CI/CD technologies include Jira and Slack, to mention a couple. Test Sigma supports and connects with both of these.

Bamboo

A continuous delivery pipeline is created by Bamboo, a continuous integration server that automates the administration of software application releases. Assigning versions, categorizing releases, building, and functional testing, as well as deploying and activating new versions on live systems, are all covered by Bamboo.

The notable attribute of Bamboo is its builds are triggered depending on changes seen in the repository. Notifications are pushed from BitBucket, according to a predetermined schedule when a build is finished, or any combination of these. SVN, Git, and Mercurial repositories can immediately apply the CI scheme from the main line to newly discovered branches. It gives pre-environment rights that let developers and testers deploy to individual environments as needed while the production environment is kept secure. It allows up to 100 remote build agents and carries out many tests, runs concurrently, and receives timely responses.

GitLab

GitLab is a collection of instruments for controlling various phases of the software development lifecycle. The main component is a web-based Git repository manager with problem tracking, statistics, and a Wiki.

With each change or push on GitLab, you have the option to start builds, launch tests, and deploy code. Jobs can be created on another server, on a virtual machine, or using Docker containers.

The main feature of GitLab is that it delivers safe applications and licensing compliance with container scanning, static application security testing (SAST), dynamic application security testing (DAST), and dependency scanning. It provides a set of branching tools that are used to see, produce and manage codes and project data. It has a single distributed version control system that is used to design, develop, and manage codes and project data, allowing for quick iteration and the delivery of business values. It offers scalability and a single source of truth for working together on projects and code. GitLab assists delivery teams in embracing CI and automating and accelerating application delivery and releases by automating builds, integration, and source code verification.

Buddy

Buddy is a CI/CD tool that uses code from GitHub, Bitbucket, and GitLab to create, test, and deploy websites and apps. It uses DevOps, monitoring, and notification processes together with Docker containers that come pre-installed with the languages and frameworks you may build upon.

This CI/CD tool creates, alters, and utilizes test and build environments by providing superior Git integrations and support to the community. It has many different attachable services which include Elastic, MariaDB, Memcached, Mongo, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, Redis, Selenium Chrome, and Firefox. It makes sure that the workspace, project, pipeline, and action scopes are fixed, programmable, plain, and encrypted. Buddy supports intelligent change detection, cutting-edge caching, parallelism, and general optimizations. It manages workflows using templates for pipeline cloning, exporting, and importing. 

Travis CI

A CI service used to create and test projects is called Travis CI. New contributions are automatically found by Travis CI and published to a GitHub repository. Additionally, Travis CI will build the project and run tests after each new code commit.

Travis CI is a service provider. It has a lot of important features or traits. As it has simple OS installation and upgrading criteria with a simple user-friendly interface. It allows viewing live builds for GitHub projects and multiple cloud service deployments.  It has built-in database services and provides pristine VMs for each build compiling with iOS, Linux, and macOS. It supports different programming languages including R, C, Python, Ruby, Java, C, C#, C++, Perl, PHP, and JavaScript (with Node.js).  It has multiple cloud services deployments and auto-deploys when builds pass.

Concluding Thoughts

Continuous performance testing is the way to go if you want to stay ahead of performance issues and outperform your competitors. The major point is that monitoring performance throughout the development process of new features or products before they go live can save time later during maintenance cycles when bugs are present. Hence, companies should always improve the procedures used by development teams. Moreover, thanks to continuous performance testing, it won’t interfere with your consumers’ experience. This involves considering how much load each feature will need once used.