One of the main trends in software development is to deliver software more quickly. DevOps, continuous delivery or continuous integration are some of the approaches that have been promoted recently to achieve this goal. In their article “DevOps Advantages for Testing”, Gene Gotimer and Thomas Stiehm discusses the advantages that these approaches could provide to software testing and software quality.
The article starts with a presentation of the different aspects of DevOps, continuous delivery and continuous integration. It then discusses the topics of code coverage, mutation testing and static analysis, explaining how they can be integrated in a continuous integration process. The article then presents the concept of delivery pipeline, defined as the process of taking a code change from a developer and getting it delivered to the customer or deployed into production. For each topic discussed, the article proposes some open source tools that can be used for this activity.The end of the article discusses how these concepts are applied in a case study.
The conclusion of Gene Gotimer and Thomas Stiehm is that “The journey towards a continuous delivery practice relies heavily on quality tests to show if the software is (or is not) a viable candidate for production. But along with the increased reliance on testing, there are many opportunities for performing additional tests and additional types of tests to help build confidence in the software. By taking advantage of the automated tests and automated deployments, the quality of the software can be evaluated and verified more often and more completely.”
Read the complete article on http://www.crosstalkonline.org/storage/issue-archives/2016/201605/201605-Gotimer.pdf