“Without testing early in the lifecycle you will not be able to deliver with high quality nor keep high quality during the lifecycle,” agreed Thomas Noe, Project Quality Manager at Collibra.

Recent research found that more than 56% of defects occur in the requirement phase, 23% in the design phase, 10% in the development phase and 10% defects originate in regression testing and other sources. To prevent defects, developers should design their unit tests and review code before commits.

Agile testing

Quality Assurance Manager at Wyndham Vacation Rentals UK, Felicity Lord, continued: “These days, with the adoption of agile and CD/CI, I would expect the test to either be driving the whole development lifecycle or at the very least for it to be considered a constant presence throughout the lifecycle from beginning to end.”

Agile testing is an approach typically implemented to reach high-quality products, sooner and more efficiently in the cycle. Testers work in an agile way by providing feedback early to the developers, testing manually and building automation scripts; this helps teams to meet their sprint goals with near production ready code.

In SDLC, the steps a tester typically makes is to plan the entire project, finalise the plan, receive clarification from the client, then prepare. But, of course, this varies from project to project, depending on the requested outcome.

“I have experienced the traditional waterfall model considering testing as a phase. The testing phase is known to come at the end of the development cycle. Often, I’ve been facing challenges to stick on the planed execution window if the input quality or the start dates were not as expected,” revealed Chekib Ayed, Global Head of Testing Practices at Societe Generale Corporate and Investment Banking (SGCIB).

‘Delivering benefits faster’

Ayed believes ‘Shifting Left’ the testing activities will bring at least 3 main benefits:

1. Testers will have more proximity to developers which helps to have more synchronised comprehension, which leads to more effective and relevant test cases.
2. Defects will be detected and fixed at early stages that reduce drastically the fixing costs.
3. Automated tools are more easily integrated into the software factory, which increases the global quality of the product.

According to Steve Watson, Interim Project Manager at Reed Business Information, “The earlier something wrong is found, the easier it is to fix. But there’s another angle: Testers see things from a different perspective and can provide input into design discussions, offering insights that may be missed if left until late in the day.”

For test activities to be achieved earlier in a more efficient way, you must invest in infrastructures. In order to test early in the process, you need tooling, test environments, and quick deploys.

Infrastructure investments

Every tester wants to deliver the highest quality product while adhering to cost containment principals and to achieve this, you have to maintain many different machine environments and test applications. Typical test environment compromise an array of test servers, little virtualisation and primarily manual allocation and configuration of individual test environments.

The following tools can be helpful when verifying the functionality of an application:

• Selenium Webdriver: The advantage of using Selenium WebDriver over other UI automation tools is that you have the ability to write your automated tests in different supported programming languages, such as Java, C#, Ruby, Python, and PHP.
• JMeter: This is an opensource performance testing tool written entirely in Java. It can be used to load test websites as well as SOAP and REST web services and databases.
• SoapUI: When using SoapUI you can create mock web services, which helps when creating tests for a web service which is not yet fully completed.
• WireMock: This can be deployed into a test environment and used within a unit test, as well as supports HTTP response stubbing, request verification, proxy/intercept, record/playback of stubs and fault injection.
• Selenium Grid: This is a useful tool when running the same tests on multiple browsers or against other operating systems. It also executed Selenium tests in parallel.
• Appium: An open source test automation framework for use with native, hybrid and mobile web apps, which also drives iOS and Android apps using the WebDriver protocol.
• Cucumber: Cucumber simplifies requirements for stakeholders, as well aids the collaboration between team members in specifying requirements, guides development, drives automated tests and describes the system.

“Shorter feedback loops result in faster time to market and lower overall costs of software development. Using API mocking and service virtualisation to test components in isolation early in the lifecycle with tools like Traffic Parrot or Wiremock has never failed me,” added Wojciech Bulaty, CTO at Traffic Parrot.

Cloud computing

Cloud computing and tooling present an unprecedented opportunity to accelerate the business value received from the software delivery lifecycle.

Moving development tools into the cloud can ensure that all developers are using the same level of tools, as well as allows you to define a single set of virtual machines for testing, which can be started when needed and then shut down when the tests have been completed.

A development and test cloud provide the following benefits for clients:

• Cloud increases flexibility, as well as maximises infrastructure utilisation
• Environment provisioning drops from weeks or months to minutes or even hours
• Application virtualisation speeds up the development and test cycle
• Cloud-based app lifecycle management tooling allows for standard configurations and quick onboarding.

In conclusion, Shift Left testing strategies, including cloud computing and tools, can help when testing as early as possible in the development process. This enables both testers and development with diverse skill sets to unanimously focus on quality from day one of the projects, instead of finding defects later in the development lifecycle.

Written by Leah Alger

The post How to ‘shift left’ to defeat defects appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

Software applications are becoming more and more complex and intertwined because of a large number of different devices and platforms. This is why it’s important to ensure that you, as a tester, have the correct methodologies and tools in place; to meet your clients’ specified requirements and to secure your software. Nevertheless, this can be a challenge.

As we all know, IT has witnessed an evolution of virtualisation in the form of cloud computing over the last couple of years, which comes with an array of different tools. It has helped testers view everything ‘As a Service’, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS), as well as comes with a lot of benefits, such as scalability, low cost, is easily customisable and ensures dynamic availabilities in testing environments – helping users to easily replicate a customer environment and find defects early in the cycle.

Cloud computing

Steve Watson, Interim Project Manager at Reed Business, agreed: “Test environments always used to be a pain to manage – they were never up-to-date with the right data or code changes, and there was always a cost element to requesting more environments, so often environment clashes would ensue. With the advent of cloud computing, we can spin up a test environment when needed, and tear it down once finished.”

With the upcoming GDPR coming to light on the 25 May 2018, many firms are doing all they can to comply with this new privacy law. Many vendors are offering tools to help firms comply and prepare with the GDPR, such as security tools; assessment, data governance and management tools; and user consent and compliance tools.

“With the advent of GDPR, we have to be careful about obfuscating any personal data that we may have in pre-live environments. In terms of tools, Selenium Webdriver has almost become the defacto standard for web application testing, and you can configure it to work with other tools such as Specflow or Gauge to add in business case definitions, and then code in whichever language you choose,” Watson continued.

Decision making

Ensuring tools are up-to-date can be particularly difficult, because of the scope of software testing changing rapidly, as well as clients needs. Having the correct tools in place is essential for organisations looking to move beyond a basic testing approach. Test tools are needed in order to conduct quality tests at high quality, as well as increase capacity, accuracy and capabilities.

“It can be very hard to stay up-to-date with tools, particularly when you are few in numbers. But if we don’t keep an eye on the future then it might hit us hard in the face when it becomes the present. Very often we put too many constraints in place, which prevents people from experimenting. We do need to make sure that strategic work doesn’t have a free for all approach to tooling, but for tactical work, making it easy to experiment provides a low-risk way to learn new approaches,” said Alan Richardson, Independent Consultant at EvilTester.

Tools can be used to fit the root cause of a problem within a product/project. It’s highly important to ensure that you have made the right tool decisions at the start of a project, which can be a time-consuming project in itself. Typically, testing tools such as Selenium and SoapUI appear to be helpful.

Wojciech Bulaty, CTO at Traffic Parrot, continued: “When you understand why we change the root cause or the problem. Typically, it’s because of failing to articulate the on-going costs of keeping things as they are, compared to the cost of change. Sometimes it’s best to leave things as they are, more often fix the issue by upgrading software or architecture as soon as possible.”

DevOps initiatives

DevOps has also had a massive effect on the industry. Not only is it a combination of cultural philosophies and practices, but its tools also help to increase an organisation’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: improving projects and products at a faster pace than firms using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes.

“Ensuring the tools and environments are fit for purpose, up-to-date and easily accessible is a major part of my job! I undertook a substantial restructure and investment over last year, and this, to make sure that the tools and environments we use are suiting our needs and future desires. This has ultimately led to the DevOps initiative that my team are now working on,” added Felicity Lord, Quality Assurance Manager at Wyndham Vacation Rentals.

Be sure to register your place for the National Software Testing Conference which will be held on the 22-23 May 2018 at the Millennium Gloucester Hotel, Kensington, London, for the chance to listen to our speakers talk more in-depth about pressing industry topics such as automation, quality engineering approaches, emerging technologies, and manual testing and continuous testing. Click here to register and find out more about this unmissable event: http://www.softwaretestingconference.com/about/

Written by Leah Alger

The post NSTC speakers reveal the importance of using the correct tools appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

Steve has been in testing for many years, working his way from Tester, to Senior Lead Manager, to now currently being the Interim Project Manager for GDPR at Reed Business, which is an interesting piece of legislation, as he gets to use his management skills in a different way – stakeholder and task management, organising a security review of applications, managing the backlog of remediation tasks, identifying third party vendors to be contacted, and working with colleagues – not just in tech, but also in the customer services, sales, marketing and conferences teams.

When he first began to test, everything was mainframe-based, manually tested, and there were no tools! He also had no training, and there was no certification to help him learn his job.

Watson revealed: “I began to test before the internet, so, of course, there was no interconnectivity, and no need to be so security aware as there were fewer ways for people to access the bank’s computer network I previously worked for.

Waterfall to agile

“Now, not only have we had e-commerce for a number of years, we have the ‘Internet of Things’, and all the challenges it brings with interconnected devices. The challenges of privacy and security are prevalent in ways we could not have dreamt of back in the late 1980’s, and early 1990’s.

“We also transitioned from waterfall to more agile methodologies, changing the way in which testers are involved in technical work, and the very nature of our roles (shift left). Finally, there is tooling – many testers write code to test developers code, which didn’t happen when I first began to test.”

Nowadays, AI is very much a talking point, and the creation of artificially intelligent machines appears to be a huge turning point for us humans. A lot of what testers do requires code, and most of what we produce is used by human beings.

“AI will change the scope of software testing, as fewer humans will have to take actions, because of more machine-to-machine types of devices; machines will make the decisions that humans would have done. We may care less about usability and how things look on a screen, as the end-user is not a person, in which case our focus will be much more on data and analytics,” continued Watson.

Test environments

According to Watson, test environments always used to be a pain to manage – mainly due to not being kept up-to-date with the correct data or code changes, and there is always a cost element to requesting more environments, so often environment clashes would ensue.

“Now, with the advent of cloud computing, we can spin up a test environment when needed, and tear it down once finished. The data we need can be deployed, although with the advent of GDPR, we have to be careful about obfuscating any personal data that we may have in pre-live environments,” added Watson.

“In terms of tools, Selenium Webdriver has almost become the defacto standard for web application testing, and you can configure it to work with other tools such as Specflow or Gauge to add in business case definitions, and then code in whichever language you choose. We have used this for a number of years, adding SoapUI, Postman and other tools for API testing.”

He also noted that it’s hard to move from tool-to-tool when you have created a large set of tests, as it’s not ideal to be spending time reinventing the wheel, so testers now look at tooling if they are working on something brand new, or if they find that an existing test is not fit for purpose. We take a pragmatic approach to tooling needs, taking into account skills, time and budget.

Written by Leah Alger

The post Interim Project Manager at Reed Business Information reveals testing transformations appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

Bowles has been a part of the software testing industry for more than 15 years’, with his first taste of software testing being in the form of performing UAT as a supply chain analyst at the head office of a supermarket chain. While in the course of this work, he luckily enough got in contact with the development Test Manager, who was in the process of expanding his team of testers, who soon employed him – helping start his testing career.

He then became the QA Engineer for a software-house who made compliance software for financial institutions. “Soon after joining, I was asked if I would like to write regression tests for the automated testing tool that had been built in-house. I ended up leading a small team of automated testers and also the developers in test that build and maintain the automated testing software,” explained Bowles.

‘A new challenge in the e-commerce space’

Furthermore, he finally arrived at Lovehoney, which was 5 years ago now, in hope to find a fresh new challenge in the e-commerce space.

Bowles enjoyed all the challenges that he encountered in his testing career, especially learning to script in python in order to build an automated regression test framework based on selenium that still forms the basis of the automated testing we run today.

He continued: “My favourite challenge and biggest achievement working at Lovehoney was when I made a change to the payment gateway we use in the checkout for all our sites within less than a month, with no problems when we went live. I also helped to update all the automated checkout regression tests during the testing process which helped the company quickly regression test when fixes to bugs were found.”

When Bowles began working for Lovehoney, he started as a QA Engineer in the tech team, but because of showing dedication to his work and tasks, he now manages a team of 7 QA Engineers, which led to him being promoted as the QA Manager.

Automated test environment

“I came into the company as the only QA Engineer and soon realised there was too much work for one QA, so began building a team to help improve the quality of the new live features we released,” added Bowles.

“I do fewer hands-on testing now but still have a very hands-on role in the creation of scripts and maintenance of the automated test suite. We run a large suite of selenium tests each night on our develop branch and smaller suites as part of our automated test environment creation triggered on the pull request. This smaller suite of tests gives us confidence that the core functionality has not been regressed before the manual testing starts on the created test environment for the feature under test.”

As QA Manager he now has to look after all recruitment for the QA team. To help him, he created an interview process, which has yielded good results with a number of capable individuals being recruited for the team. He documents his process on his blog: http://www.softwaretestinghobbit.com/?m=201507.

Tech leadership

As part of the tech leadership team, he has to attend more meetings than he used to and works more on testing strategies. The testing strategy is required to support the current best practices for developing software that is used in his development team.

Bowles revealed: “Since I moved into management I have to work on planning much more. I work with our project management office team to make sure all development projects have the testing resources available from our QA team.

“I feel I am really lucky to work at Lovehoney, because I have learnt that you can work in a place where you are respected for what you do, where the senior management team are open to new ideas and where developers and testers share a mutual respect for what each other can bring to the development process.”

Lovehoney has recently employed a new CIO and Development Manager, both of whom Bowles is looking forward to working with, and seeing what exciting plans they have for the tech department to grow and operate in the future.

Exploratory testing

“As our development team is moving to a microservices model as QA’s we need to understand the best way to help test these new services and what tools can help us to do this, and develop more of the QA Engineers in the team so we are able to automate tests but not lose manual testing skills such as exploratory testing, as I believe humans find the worse bugs more sufficiently and quickly,” he added.

Since Bowles joined the industry, he admitted that there is a lot more emphasis on test automation due to the agile approach to software development requiring quicker delivery times.

“We want new features faster but we don’t want to compromise quality, lots of iterations of software as new features are added to require regression testing, ensuring features already coded are not broken by new features that have been added. The best way to do regression testing is to automate and let the testers manually test new features,” said Bowles.

Agile development

Agile development processes have helped testers to develop skills in other areas such as business analysis and stakeholder management, according to Bowles. Being able to have input into the process where users stories are created is a massive benefit of increased testing. Finding issues at the user story stage is also much cheaper after a user story has been coded.

Bowles believes “all these development processes have given testers a much better overall view of the development process and what we can add rather than the view that we just test what the developer gives us.”

He also noted that there will be more scrutiny on the ROI from automated testing as more and more companies start to roll out automated testing frameworks, as it takes real development practices and skills to build a robust testing framework and to maintain and improve it – consequently is not a low-cost option.

Written by Leah Alger

The post QA Manager celebrates five years at Lovehoney appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

In a bid to enable LogiGear’s ability to ease automation, continuous improvement and continuous delivery pain points, the partnership is bringing in selenium testing practices to help enterprises scale their web and mobile test automation programmes and DevOps transformations.

Manuel Ruiz, vice president of customer success at Sauce Labs, commented: ”With today’s incredible demands to release high-quality apps quickly, most organisations see tremendous value in the power of continuous testing that Sauce Labs delivers, but many lack the skills or resources to fully capitalise on it.

“By leveraging the highly specialised test automation expertise that partners like LogiGear bring to the market, our customers can greatly accelerate the pace of transformation and realise the full promise of continuous delivery and DevOps.”

LogiGear also helps enterprises maximise the ROI and drive the adoption of Sauce Labs and selenium testing practices, delivering complex test automation projects for more than two decades.

Written from press release by Leah Alger

The post LogiGear drives the adoption of Sauce Labs and selenium appeared first on DevOps Online North America.