How to ensure the seamless execution of Continuous Delivery?

The ecosystem that drives application development has become increasingly competitive. This is due to a host of factors such as shifting customer loyalties, rapidly changing technologies, and cost imperatives. Companies, in their quest to achieve digital transformation and reach customers in the best possible manner, want to deploy applications that are rich in features, robust in functionalities and cheaper in cost. Since the traditional waterfall model of developing, testing and deploying software is found to be inadequate in addressing the above mentioned concerns, companies are embracing the Agile and DevOps model of development.

To achieve the continuous delivery of software, the development team should entail continuous integration. This would mean integrating the codes early on in the SDLC instead of waiting at the end of the development sprint. The approach can identify and resolve conflicts or glitches early rather than spending a considerable amount of time on carrying out regression testing later. Following continuous integration early on in the SDLC helps the DevOps testing team to better understand the code, features and functionalities.

What is continuous delivery all about?

The process entails making changes in the application at any stage of the SDLC without impacting the quality of the product or its user experience. The changes can include adding new features and functionalities, fixing glitches, or changing the configuration.

The way forward

• The changes that need to be incorporated into the software are broken into smaller components or steps.

• To fix glitches, the developers receive feedback from the test team within the sprint. The test team, on its part, comes to know about the changes/glitches from a host of automated tests – regression, usability, performance etc.

• Any new feature to be incorporated in the software may need additional testing for validation before its eventual deployment.

How to create a continuous delivery pipeline of software?

In order to create a continuous delivery pipeline, the glitches need to be identified and removed at the earliest. And since an application has multiple interfaces with devices, networks, operating systems, platforms, and frameworks, the interfaces should be tested threadbare. This is important to provide a rich customer experience – the ultimate arbiter to generate revenue. The complexity of testing a software across devices, networks, operating systems, and platforms would call for using test automation. The first step towards that is to create a robust test automation suite.

Running test automation: To ensure DevOps continuous integration, the automated tests should run for each and every change that has been made to the application. This includes running test not only for the main branch of the application but other branches to ensure glitches are captured early and removed. The test team can start with a few tests such as unit test, integration test, acceptance test and usability test among others. To address such considerations, one can make use of the on-premise systems or the cloud. The best part of running an automated test suite is its vast coverage area and the speed of executing repetitive tests.

Integrate early: The first part of carrying out test automation is building a test culture where the test team adds the features/changes to the main arm of the application instead of the branch(es) alone. Overall, the features should be integrated into the main trunk of the application as soon as they are rendered elsewhere. Here, delaying integration would risk the development team to forget adding the changes to the main branch. And should the number of changes or features incorporated in the branches be large, the complexities arising out of the same can become a tough challenge to face. Integrating the changes early would reduce any conflict scenarios and make it easier to be shared across the team.

Prevent any break of the main branch: Breaking the build for the main branch by developers can create unforeseen situations. These include tackling changes that have been incorporated into the broken build and preventing application failures. Thus, the test suite should be made robust enough to give instant feedback or notifications to the developer(s) should he/she/they end up in breaking the main build.

Write a test for each and every feature/change: The test team should create automated tests for each and every feature. The step, instead of appearing to slow down the development process, will reduce the time spent on regression testing and fixing bugs. The final codebase will work as per the stated business objectives.

Conclusion

The crucial aspect of continuous deployment is to involve the management in testing each and every feature of the application. If this slows down the release process at the beginning, it should be pursued to achieve the long term objective of meeting user expectations.