How to accelerate your Agile and DevOps journey with continuous testing 

Tags: devops, devopstesting, continuoustesting, testing
Published: 2022-02-18 23:11:36

Embarking on the journey towards Agile and DevOps success in your enterprise is a long and challenging one that offers several benefits along the way. The implementation and success of a robust SDLC are key criteria in taking your enterprise to the next level. How you choose to future-proof your [continuous testing ](https://www.guru99.com/continuous-testing.html)capabilities will have a pronounced impact on developing an efficient and optimized pipeline. And it comes down to choosing the approach, best practices, and providers to help enterprises optimize their QA capabilities. 

 
This article explores how you can accelerate your Agile and DevOps journey with modern continuous testing practices. 

## Best practices of continuous testing 

The success of enterprises' business growth lies in digital offerings that are tested early, often, and automatically. Still, they need to follow certain practices to maximize productivity with Agile and DevOps.   

**Align business goals with testing strategy**

To undertake an Agile and DevOps journey first requires aligning your enterprise to specific business goals. These defined goals help enterprises drive their continuous testing strategy. Examples of clearly defined business goals include  

- Enhancing your customer experience with high-quality products. 
- Delivering quality products faster. 
- Adapting to increase customer satisfaction and retention 
- Reducing cost while improving efficiency. 
 
Aligning with the listed goals requires facing some common challenges, such as the lack of scalable infrastructure, traceability, and team members' skillsets. However, a clear strategy for continuous testing can go a long way in overcoming these challenges and meeting your goals. 

## Adaptability - vital to continuous testing  

Several enterprise owners find it difficult to adopt new processes and skills to meet Agile and DevOps needs. Despite recognizing the pitfalls of manual testing, transitioning to automation testing faces resistance. There is also a need to break barriers between your development, testing, and operations teams so they may seamlessly collaborate towards a singular business objective. It often involves a complete overhaul and restructuring of existing infrastructure and systems in your enterprise. While it may seem overwhelming to organize internally, enterprises can leverage specialized external providers to manage these hurdles. [Successful implementation of Agile and DevOps methodology requires enterprises to adapt to new IT processes](https://www.aspiresys.com/devops-continuous-test-automation/).  

## Bridge the gap by outsourcing continuous testing 

Using the specialized skills and expertise of QA providers is helping several enterprises bridge the gaps in the evolving capabilities of continuous testing. Despite taking the first few steps towards Agile and DevOps, many enterprises struggle to keep pace with a highly competitive market.  

Fortunately, leveraging pure-play providers and larger system integrators can guarantee consistency and efficiency. Amidst escalating costs and uncertainty in the wake of Covid-19, outsourcing QA can help your enterprise keep pace with its competition. Internal teams that were previously relied upon to meet QA needs can focus on more high-priority tasks while quality and reliability come through third parties.   

**Balance speed and quality with automation**

What differentiates enterprise leaders from laggards is the frequency of releases. And each release must be high-quality digital offerings to ensure increased productivity and customer satisfaction for a greater enterprise ROI. Emerging technologies and AI/ ML-based automation tools, testing metrics, and a defined testing strategy are essential to enterprise growth.   

Therefore, it is imperative that your enterprise use the right tools, processes, and people in harmony with your business goals to remain ahead of your competition with high-quality products that are faster to market. 

**Adopt change management and integrated workflows**

With the increased speed of Agile and DevOps methodologies, your enterprise must respond to changes without breaking your pipeline. With everything moving so rapidly, it is easy to overlook factors that could impede your SDLC. Test automation helps deliver defect-free software in several stages of your pipeline. Still, the automation has to adjust to changes or upgrades made to an application so you do not get false test results.  

A robust change management system ensures that you can rely on your test data without breaking the system. In addition to this, the core of Agile and DevOps is to have meaningful test results that can be put into action.  

Implementing a continuous feedback system where your test results are combined with quality metrics and evaluated with automation will ensure you are within acceptable quality thresholds. This allows automatic deployment to the next stage if your application is defect-free and the opportunity to correct errors if the tests fail. Integrating your workflows so that there is minimum time wasted between each deployment stage in your SDLC is vital to a successful implementation of Agile and DevOps methods for your enterprise. 

**Conclusion**

Enterprises in the current marketplace are continuously evolving with high-quality releases that are faster to market. [Implementing Agile and DevOps methodologies in your enterprise is guaranteed to give you an edge over your competition.](https://blog.aspiresys.com/testing/can-continuous-testing-accelerate-your-agile-and-devops-journey/) While the journey towards successfully implementing these methodologies can be a trifle daunting, a scalable and reliable test automation strategy that is agile and includes CI/ CD and continuous testing will do the trick.