test management

In the era of agile and DevOps, release decisions need to be made rapidly—preferably, even automatically and instantaneously. Test results that focus solely on the number of test cases leave you with a huge blind spot. If you want fast, accurate assessments of the risks associated with promoting the latest release candidate to production, you need a new currency in testing: Risk coverage needs to replace test coverage.

Best practices for test automation emphasize reliability, portability, reusability, readability, maintainability, and more. But how can your existing automated test suite adopt these qualities? Should you address these issues with your current tests, or create an entirely new set of tests? Here are some questions that will help you determine if your test automation maintenance program is operating as it should be.

Teams everywhere are looking to speed up testing without sacrificing quality, so once again, some of the top articles last year were about continuous integration, machine learning, and—of course—how to best implement and use test automation. But readers were also interested in what they shouldn't be doing, with two high-ranking articles about test practices we should stop and a tool you may be misusing.

The advantages of shifting left and testing as early as possible are obvious. But as you automate more testing, the test suite grows larger and larger, and it takes longer and longer to run. Instead, just automate the process of finding the right set of tests to run. The key to that is machine learning. This isn't AI bots finding bugs autonomously without creating tests; this is a different way to use machine learning, and it’s far simpler.