How does Test Automation help in achieving CI and CD.

Author: Michael Wade

In this competitive market with rapidly changing requirements and evolving products, continuous delivery, continuous integration and continuous testing are all intertwined. This extremely fast adoption of business evolution, puts a serious pressure on software development. Conceptualization, design, implementation, and deployment, all needs to be done within a span of a few months or someone else will come up with it before you do. Also, after the product is deployed, be it a web or a mobile application, constant improvements and enhancements are expected.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment are most often used together and are referred to as CI-CD. Individually, they represent two different processes. CI refers to running integration tests at every code change, while CD refers to deploying every change that are validated by the tests. However, now-a-days CI-CD is used to refer to the automation of processes from development to deployment. Hence, CI-CD can be said to consist of the following steps:

  • Change of Code or Commit
  • Building the software based on the code developed.
  • Automated testing
  • Deployment of the changed code

In the above process, Automated Tests can be said to be the most important part of the CI-CD process. There can be no Continuous Integration or Continuous Delivery without automated tests that run fast, have a good coverage and no errors.

Test automation can be divided into multiple suites, each having its own objective.

  • Unit Tests: This test is run first before any changes are made to the code repository. Normally, individual classes and functions are tested here. This test is most often performed by the developers themselves.
  • Integration Tests: This test makes sure that the different modules of an application work properly with each other. Generally, integration tests need to be performed in environments that represent production environment.
  • System Tests: This tests the entire system in an environment that closely resembles the production environment.

Through Continuous testing, developers are able to perform a live test of the functionality and behavior of their code with test automation tools. Regression Testing, User Acceptance Testing and Performance Testing, all need to be executed in order to ensure the quality of the application in various customized environments. When the test module configuration is correct, tests can be automated until the alert systems notify a build failure.

Without proper execution of Continuous Testing, CI-CD will only remain an unfulfilled requirement. Continuous testing or Automated testing , helps saving in terms of production costs, as bugs reported after deployment in the production environment is a costly matter.

Conclusion

On the road to achieving continuous delivery, the main requirement is to minimize the cycle times and keep the costs low at the same time. Automated testing helps to achieve this and build an effective system. The best approach on the way to CI-CD would be to invest in a robust and scalable test automation suite.