Continous Testing

Testing is an extremely important activity -- it's essential that when we agree to build something, we have a plan for ensuring it's correct 😀.

The days of believing that throwing a release over the wall to a separate QA team are mostly behind us. Current thinking is that having developers take responsibility for testing their own software results in higher quality, and instead of separate development and QA teams, both roles should be a part of the same team, with aligned goals.

In addition, testing is not an activity that happens at the end of a project, testing is something that should happen throughout.

We know that as more time passes between working on an item and finding a bug, it becomes more expensive to fix. The cheapest time for a developer to fix a bug is right when they are working on the feature. The most expensive is when it's already deployed and they are working on something else. This requires the developer to stop what they are working on and context-switch to another area in order to track down and reproduce an issue. Then a new build has to be created, more testing, and another release...

Continuous testing aims to improve collaboration and shorten the feedback cycle, finding bugs as early as possible, and enable us to release frequently, deliver value early to our customers, and gain feedback from our users more quickly.