October 2019 Summaries

In order to achieve strong quality and move the business forward as a unit, developers and QA must come together and think holistically about the application from a user perspective, including positive and negative scenarios. Developers should take responsibility for their code and write relevant unit tests, focusing on quality rather than testing activities. To ensure this, teams can identify specific levels of quality involvement, prioritize testing activities, and communicate effectively to avoid silos and promote a shared understanding of quality ownership. By breaking down silos between development and testing, developers and QA can work together to deliver high-quality software that meets user needs and expectations.

QA teams can play a critical role in DevOps adoption by leveraging their cultural priorities of automation, holistic practices, and collaboration. QA engineers can encourage DevOps adoption by increasing automation, collaborating around testing, and modeling shared ownership. By doing so, they can help bridge silos between different teams and foster a culture of collective responsibility, ultimately contributing to the development of an efficient, reliable delivery chain.

Building a Strategy for Continuous Testing in Mobile` involves multiple testing tactics such as beta testing, test automation, and cloud-based mobile device testing. Beta testing platforms like HockeyApp allow users to bypass app store reviews and deploy on both iOS and Android, while automating beta tests with tools like FastLane can streamline the process. Cloud-based mobile device labs provide access to thousands of real devices, browsers, operating systems, screen sizes, and resolutions, enabling automated testing on real mobile devices as well as emulators. A continuous testing strategy for mobile requires leveraging these tactics to test on large groups of users pre-deployment and release bug-free applications right off the bat, making every release count in today's competitive mobile world.

A testing framework is a union of different things including guidelines, coding standards, good practices, tools, and libraries that work together to make developers faster and more efficient. An effective test framework can lower maintenance costs, improve code reusability, help focus on writing tests instead of boilerplate code, and enable the team to be reactive by bootstrapping code to write tests. When choosing a testing framework, it's essential to consider whether it's future-ready, adaptable to trends, and allows for easy switching between different technologies or frameworks without significant additional work. Open source tools are recommended as they provide a community-driven solution that can solve common testing problems, but the entire team should be involved in researching, testing, and choosing an open source tool.

Getting started with test automation can be daunting, but it's essential to determine which tests to automate first. Prioritizing high-value tests for your team and organization can help. Identifying critical application flows that must always work is crucial, such as login, registration, product image display, item addition, payment collection, and other key features. Analyzing data on user traffic and behavior helps identify the most critical combinations of browsers, versions, and operating systems to test. Best practices for successful automated testing include focusing on reusability and maintainability, writing autonomous tests, avoiding complex designs, familiarizing yourself with software design patterns, and basing your work on a testing plan or strategy rather than tools.

Automating the quick navigation menu with Appium is possible for both iOS and Android devices. Apple introduced 3D Touch on their iPhone 6S (Plus) which provided a pressure-sensitive screen that would show a quick navigation menu when pressed harder, but this feature has since been replaced by Haptic Touch. However, the functionality remains similar. The key to automating this feature is using touch actions with Appium, specifically pressing and holding down on the screen for a certain amount of time before releasing it. This can be achieved by setting the pressure option to 1 for iOS devices or not specifying it for Android devices. The example code provided demonstrates how to automate this feature using WebdriverIO and Appium, targeting both iOS 12 and below (which support 3D Touch) and Android devices.

The adoption of agile methodology has led to a significant increase in product development, requiring companies to test and validate their products within a short timeframe. AI is poised to revolutionize test automation by automatically creating and maintaining tests, reducing the need for manual effort and increasing accuracy. By leveraging machine learning techniques, AI can analyze production data to identify patterns and generate tests that are more consistent and standardized. Additionally, AI can adapt to changes in the product and update tests accordingly, making it an ideal solution for continuous integration and delivery. While there may be a significant upfront investment required to implement AI-powered testing tools, organizations that already utilize AI/ML technologies can benefit from investing in software testing, as they will be well-positioned to capitalize on this emerging market.

Continuous Integration tools support increased development velocity by automating processes, reducing risk of technical issues and bottlenecks. The most popular CI servers include Jenkins, Bamboo, Team City, and Travis CI. Continuous integration plugins can enhance this process with features such as source code repositories, repository managers, communication tools, and code quality tools. Implementing a sound continuous testing strategy in conjunction with Continuous Integration helps organizations scale their efforts and deliver software faster. Organizations like Sauce Labs offer cloud-based platforms to support the development velocity needed for innovative web and mobile applications.

Integration testing is a crucial phase in the software development pipeline where teams run checks against smaller components to ensure they work together seamlessly. To increase release velocity with CI/CD practices, it's essential to identify issues early on and roll back fixes before they propagate throughout the product lifecycle. When scaling integration testing volume, developers should prioritize well-testing their components, optimize for test parallelization, and consider infrastructure options that meet their specific requirements. A comprehensive test platform can support various testing needs, including full cross-browser coverage, headless browsers, and debugging tools, to help teams scale with their continuous testing pipeline.