Why DevOps & Agile Developers Need Intelligent Testing

As we know, enterprises are increasingly incorporating Agile and DevOps practices to shorten development times, speed-up innovation, and foster improved communication and cooperation throughout their organizations. Yet one of the resulting impacts to this shift is software quality. While release frequency increases significantly, so does the number of test cases and demands – all while shortening the time available to ensure quality.

For instance, the average time-to-market for software has decreased from four weeks to one week. Putting even more pressure on quality and testing organizations is the fact that research shows 58 percent of enterprises now deploy a new build daily, while 26 percent of enterprises deploy a new build hourly.

The testing lifecycle is also being impacted by other pressures. The digital consumer now owns an average of three devices. And the businesses that adopt omni-channel strategies achieve 91 percent greater customer retention than those that don’t. Addressing and catering to these external trends means dealing with dynamic and complex scenarios whereby many enterprises don’t know how to test or design testing architectures.

At a high level, testing traditionally has followed a very simplistic pattern, starting with creating a business objective and desired UX, then the creation of requirements, test cases, test execution and, finally, reporting the results. This model also put a heavy emphasis on the regression cycle, in which the last two steps are repeated each time a new software release is created, regardless of whether there are additional test cases. The traditional measure of success was in terms of reduction in overall regression time, which is achieved automating test execution.

However, it’s important for enterprise IT departments to understand that traditional testing doesn’t work well in Agile or DevOps environments. It no suffices for the needs of the business and if enterprises are to have any hope of keeping pace with accelerating adoption of Agile and DevOps, a serious change is needed in the approach to software quality. Apexon’s new Intelligent Testing service is designed to address those challenges, enhancing test lifecycle at multiple stages by using different types of engineering skills and expertise.

Intelligent Testing services have been designed from a holistic perspective that leverages bleeding-edge technologies, including our internal intellectual property (IP), known as ASTUTE, and artificial intelligence (AI)-based tools. The best practices and tools in Intelligent Testing services ensure that Continuous Testing is implemented more quickly, while also enhancing the entire testing lifecycle to accelerate business success.

Intelligent Testing gives enterprise IT the ability to:

• Auto-identify test cases
• Auto-generate test cases, data, and environments
• Use natural language processing (NLP) to analyze and reduce the backlog of existing test cases
• Determine gap analysis
• Configure and set up the entire testing infrastructure with test data management, test environment management, service virtualization and intelligent continuous testing capabilities
• Leverage cloud and container technologies
• Implement and optimize test execution tools that can handle everything from functional and application programming interface (API) testing to performance and omnichannel testing
• Assign analysis parameters to bots and tools so they can scan and potentially correct automation code
• Implement machine learning (ML) algorithms that can predict testing results and prescribe prioritized testing activities given desired levels of confidence, coverage, and quality
• Provide reports that combine log and app analytics

Additionally, Intelligent Testing services achieve continuous testing and enhance quality, agility and efficiency in the testing lifecycle – all of which can be customized to reflect the customer environment, maturity and desired outcome. Intelligent Testing lowers testing costs, while simultaneously increasing confidence in software deliverables, ensuring that all new releases are intelligently tested, regardless of the technologies used or the level of complication required for testing. Submit the form below for more information about how Intelligent Testing can improve your testing process.