The pressure to deliver more despite ever-growing features and bug fixes, all within shorter and shorter timelines, leaves most organizations struggling to balance the cost of testing with business demands. Testing is a critical area where speed and output quality can’t be compromised. At DataScan, our goal is to operate QA at the highest caliber resulting in better testing strategies for our Clients. This paper illustrates how we accomplish this endeavor.
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TechDriven: DataScan QA Strategy – Shift Left & Continuous Testing for Wi Application
What Is Shift-Left Testing?
Shifting-left simply refers to the idea of performing an action earlier within a process. So, as it relates to software testing, shift-left testing is the approach of testing software and moving it to the left in the delivery pipeline – or testing software earlier in the development lifecycle than is historically typical. The benefits of testing alongside the development lifecycle significantly reduce the chances of critical bugs surviving late into the lifecycle and ultimately finding their way into production. By addressing critical issues during the development phase versus later in the lifecycle where the fix could require major refactoring for resolution, we address the fix immediately, and errors do not hinder the speed of software delivery.
What is Continuous Testing?
Continuous testing can be defined as automated application testing at every stage of the development lifecycle to immediately determine the level of business risk associated with a specific release candidate (RC), i.e., test early and test often. After each RC goes through the initial round of testing, the testing process continues by adding new test scripts and/or modifications to current automated testing and then rerunning the tests. Continuous testing requires as much test automation as possible at each step of the delivery pipeline, thus enabling us to scale at every release leading to a predictable and repeatable process. Our goal of continuous testing is to achieve end-to-end automated testing for the application in development. With this, the level of business risk associated with a potential release candidate can be lowered, raising the confidence in the quality of the release.