5 Systemic Changes from Test Automation to Continuous Testing

In the dynamic landscape of software development, the journey from traditional test automation to continuous testing has become pivotal for organizations striving to achieve agility, quality, and sustainable delivery.

However, in today’s complex digital ecosystems, relying solely on automation for testing often falls short in meeting the ever-growing demands for quality, speed, and efficiency requiring to transition from test automation to continuous testing.

But continuous testing requires much more than the mastery of test automation by dedicated teams. It necessitates a shift in mindset, processes, and culture to develop a comprehensive understanding of the software production components.

This article shares 5 key changes to evolve from test automation to continuous testing leveraging a systemic approach enabling to align the software production system to the continuous testing ambitions.

Set end-to-end ownership with objectives

System transformations require a clear ownership and accountability within organizations to initiate and sustain the changes. Else, the actors will return to their day-to-day activities With many external pressures,

Continuous testing being an embedded set of activities as part of the software production process, each phase must clarify the specific activities that contribute to the achievement of continuous practices for better and faster software delivery.

The most essential phase to develop from test automation are:

1. Design ensuring that requirements and tests are collected the earliest
2. Implementation having tests done close to development or fixes
3. Operate to reuse automated tests as part of deployment and operations.

Each of these phases require a clear responsibility model for software teams eager to develop continuous testing. Even if the “who” can differ, each step requires an owner to make the task happen and a reviewer that can accept or reject the work based on criteria.

These foundations of accountability are necessary for the actors to take ownership of their destiny of software delivery, clarifying that continuous testing is a means to help them achieve their objectives of better and faster release.

Provides self-service standardized solutions

Software teams have limited resources and attention to use wisely to meet the demand of multiple stakeholders and objectives. It means that the additional responsibilities for continuous testing must be eased to provide the necessary attention.

Technology comes to help to automate and provide self-service but must be composed correctly to let teams evolve from test automation to continuous testing focusing on the key use-cases that will make the difference.

Continuous testing requires to provide the following solutions:

1. Requirements and tests referentials automated link
2. Self-service test definition and execution across environments
3. Native reporting and analytics for fast decision-making.

Software teams used to test automation do get value from their automated tests but usually miss the end-to-end integration listed above that make them win numerous hours and cycle-time for each software release.

Robust self-service standardized test automation solutions are the necessary ground to let software teams use their resources to make sure that automated tests are defined early, implemented and iterated with developers, and used up to production.

Systematically defines requirements in design

Test automation led by quality and engineering teams will naturally tend to be optimized for their own objectives. One key risk if interactions are missing with customer and product areas is to develop huge unit and integration tests suites that miss the business link.

The systemic approach can be used to make sure that tests, whether manual or automated, are assessed as part of the initial design discussion as part of review mechanisms. That way, the team has a regular encounter to keep aligning the functional needs.

The main value of these reviews are to keep shifting-left the test automation effort to meet the users need and product goals. If the team is unable to present automated tests understood by the product team, they failed in their automation effort.

These early sharings are also good opportunities to align expectations before the coding work ever start, aligning for example the test effort needed based on the feature maturity, or adjust it based on concrete issues like team availability.

Drive results and improve based on measures

Test automation efforts must enable the team to reach a particular destination. While an inspiring vision is required and helps to motivate, concrete objectives and deliverables will push the team to act and adapt based on their experimentation.

Measures can be challenging to choose as they can incentivize the wrong behavior, miss particular points, or make the team lose sight of the desired end-result. That’s why the objective must be kept clear like in OKRs, and supporting measures defined.

A practical model is to define up to 3 metrics of different types:

• Outputs are basis metrics following the result of a productive activity (e.g. test executed)
• Outcomes measures the contribution of the activity to a broader process like lead-time or change failed rate
• Impacts represent the external results of activities usually linked to objective that can be business, customer, or product-driven

That framework measurement must be in place from the start to know the starting point, the desired target, and intermediary steps the teams must pursue in their iterations. From there, a regular assessment is required to adapt activities, and in some cases the metrics.

The tooling in place in your software delivery pipeline will usually provide metrics you can rely on. In all cases, a validation of the computation and standardized data collection must be performed so that metrics can be trusted and shared within the organization.

Create an ecosystem of community learning

Last but not least, the software production having its actors at the center requires specific activities to let them develop the gap of skills from test automation to continuous testing, where more collaboration and adaptation is required.

Teams need executive support here to devote a small portion of their time for sharing and learning the new practices. Ideally, the emerging community of practices are best when supported by executives that can valorize improvements being led.

At first, the focus is to make sure that sharing is happening with clear leaders and an agenda to show first results. From there, the objective is to encourage collaboration, knowledge exchange, and peer-to-peer learning among teams.

On top of developing the skills gap from test automation to continuous testing, this ecosystem of learning will be the accelerator of best practices adoption in different teams making a cascading effect on the deployment of continuous practices.

When things are naturally done in the day-to-day because they make sense and bring value to the team with continuous improvements is the pivot from test automation to continuous testing you can reach with this systemic approach to software production.