devops

Organizations have matured their software development practices over the past few years. Despite advancements and innovations, testing remains one of the biggest challenges in DevOps.

For applications that have fully integrated service middleware, application servers, and backend databases, validation and verification of the entire application ecosystem is critical and complex. The challenge of testing these types of systems is compounded when each integrated application or component is developed by a different team or third-party vendor. Furthermore, application teams with diverse development practices generally require quick responses to system validation checks.

Max Saperstone tells the story of how a health care company striving to get to continuous releases built up their automation to secure confidence in regular releases. Initially, as no test automation existed, Max was able to take an opportunity for greenfield test automation and, in the span of twelve months, develop over two thousand test cases. A pipeline was created to verify the integrity of the automated tests and build Docker containers for simplified test execution. These containers could be easily reused by developers and the DevOps team to verify the application. Join Max as he walks through the feedback loop that was created to allow application verification to go from hours to minutes. Max will share his choices of BDD tooling, integrated with WebDriver solutions, to verify the state of web and mobile applications.

Lots of test automation efforts in agile software development fail, or at least do not maximize their potential. This article looks at two main reasons test automation may not live up to the expectations that testers and other stakeholders in the agile development process have, then outlines six steps to avoid falling into these traps. Here's how to succeed with test automation in an agile environment.