As product releases speed up, DevOps teams face a critical challenge: Can your QA processes evolve to keep pace? Traditional methods often struggle to support the demands of continuous integration (CI) and agile development, but the solution isn't to abandon exploratory testing or rely solely on machine learning. Instead, success lies in strategically optimizing and scaling your testing capabilities to align with your business goals.
In this article, we'll go deeper into the world of Continuous Integration – what it is, the benefits it offers, and the essential practices you need to adopt. By refining your QA processes, you can transform them into a powerful strategic asset, driving market success and delivering high-quality mobile and web applications that propel your company to new heights.
In the past few years, continuous integration has emerged as a cornerstone of modern software development, embraced by teams across the globe. CI tools like Jenkins have become trusted components in the automation of delivery pipelines, while open-source systems like Google’s Kubernetes provide additional flexibility for managing complex deployments.
Continuous integration (CI), involves a set of practices and principles that enable software development teams to make frequent, reliable code changes. CI is designed to enhance workflow, facilitate smoother development processes, and foster a culture of collaboration. It also serves as a philosophy aimed at ensuring consistency in the integration process, allowing teams to merge code changes frequently and with greater confidence.
CI is not just about automation; it’s about fostering a culture where frequent integration is the norm, and where teams work together to maintain a high level of code quality. By implementing CI, teams can continuously deliver integrated code – whether it’s new features or bug fixes – ensuring that ‘green builds’ are always ready for release. The process is straightforward:
Without CI, engineering teams risk becoming isolated from the broader organization, leading to communication breakdowns, increased bureaucratic costs, and slower code releases. This fragmentation makes it difficult to estimate delivery times and increases the likelihood of integration issues, as teams struggle to combine disparate pieces of code into a cohesive product.
CI promotes transparency, which benefits not only developers but the entire organization. By enabling more effective planning and execution, CI helps ensure that development efforts are aligned with business goals. In a CI-driven environment, everyone – from developers to stakeholders – can have greater confidence in the stability and reliability of the software being produced.
CI is usually used in tandem with agile software development. A product roadmap composed of a list of tasks is drawn up, with these tasks then allocated to members of the engineering team. The software engineers can then work on these tasks independently and in parallel with one another. As individual tasks are completed, software developers can add them to the CI system so that they can be integrated into the wider software development project. When using CI, follow this step-by-step process:
While continuous integration is a critical component of modern software development, it is just one part of a broader automated software release pipeline, which also includes continuous delivery (CD) and continuous deployment (CD).
Now that we’ve clarified the differences between continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment, we need to look at some of the key benefits of introducing CI tools to the build process. CI can have transformative impacts on development practices, smoothing the release process and allowing for a more productive production environment – so let’s look at how that happens.
One key advantage of continuous integration, delivery, and deployment (CI/CD) is that it allows developers to integrate smaller pieces of new code. As a result, these code changes are simpler and more straightforward than integrating larger pieces of source code, leading to fewer problems further down the line. With continuous testing, these smaller batches of code can be tested once they’re added to the code repository, so any problems are uncovered sooner.
CI tools should also allow for more efficient isolation of any faults – fault isolations should be easier to highlight and then to implement. This way, there should be fewer bugs appearing in the software, reducing the risk of sudden breakdowns and other technical problems as issues are discovered and addressed before they can damage the system as a whole.
As failures are easier to detect with CI/CD, this should help to speed up your production and release cycle, while ensuring that applications meet a consistently high standard. Smooth CI/CD pipelines ensure that codes are continually merged and deployed, so that they’re always in a release-ready state. Your test-driven development process should always take account of how end users will be using your applications, and reflect that closely.
With an automated build process, you should find that it’s easier to maintain your software and resolve any small defects. Solving non-critical issues quicker comes with numerous advantages. In particular, it frees your developers and testers to focus on more serious issues, making sure that these are addressed sooner. The ultimate beneficiaries are your end users as they’ll benefit from enhanced functionality.
Indeed, satisfied customers are the aim of the game. First impressions count for a lot: If a user is confronted with a poorly-designed user interface, there’s a good chance they’ll look for alternatives instead. Your CI/CD process should also allow you to tweak future versions of the app, including adding new features, based on how your customers actually use it. Customer feedback is important – you must pay attention to it and take it seriously.
Important as it is to understand why continuous integration can work for your DevOps team, it’s also essential to familiarize yourself with the relevant best practices – from integration tests, test suites, and key metrics through to dependencies and tutorials. Here, we’ll take a closer look at some of them, taking our cue from software developer Martin Fowler’s principles of continuous integration:
A single shared repository can make a huge difference. Software development is unavoidably complex, involving a code base consisting of many different files and with multiple individual developers working on any given project. Everyone should know where to find the files they need, and this is why there should be a single repository. There should be no ambiguity or uncertainty about where particular files are stored.
Automated tests and build environments are invaluable. These days, automated build environments are a regular fixture of development: Java has Ant and Unix has Make, while GitHub and Docker Hub can also be used to set up automated builds.While newer tools like Maven and Gradle have gained popularity, especially for managing dependencies, Apache Ant still has a strong foothold in the Java ecosystem due to its simplicity, familiarity, and ability to integrate with existing workflows and infrastructure. Many developers continue to prefer Ant for its straightforward approach to building Java projects. It can be a very complicated process (including loading schemas into databases, moving files, compilation, and so on), turning sources into a running system, which is why you should automate it.
With automated testing, highlighting and resolving bugs in the software is rendered much more efficient. Just because a program is up and running, of course, doesn’t necessarily mean that it functions as it should. Including automated tests in the build process can help to ensure that any bugs are caught quicker. However, self-testing code requires a series of automated unit tests that can analyze a large part of the code and be self-checking.
If you have a broken build, you shouldn’t hang around before fixing it. If the mainline build fails, it should be fixed without delay. Mainline breaks aren’t necessarily a disaster, but if they’re happening continually, it suggests your team needs to be more careful before committing code. What matters, though, is that errors are fixed quickly. One method of doing this is regression to the most recent known good build; you can then progress from there.
Communication is central to continuous integration, so everyone working on a particular project needs to have visibility of its current state and any changes that might have been made to it. Communicating the status of the mainline (or master branch) build is particularly important. When members of the team have a clear overview of how work is progressing, and which changes have been made, this can eliminate avoidable errors and confusion.
There’s no simple, one-size-fits-all solution to introducing continuous integration – making CI work for you will obviously depend on the particular structure of your setup as well as the make-up of your team, so you’ll need to be flexible and pragmatic about it. And if you’re just starting out, and adopting continuous integration for the first time, it may be worth getting some pointers from teams that have used it before.
At Global App Testing, we enhance your continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) processes with testing solutions designed for speed, coverage, and efficiency:
By partnering with us, you’ll benefit from:
Schedule a call with our QA specialist today to optimize your development process and ensure smooth, efficient releases!
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