Are you worried about your organisation’s ability to cope with the complexity of delivering at high velocity, with excellent quality, in multi-speed IT landscape and hybrid environments?

DevOps – an art (combination of philosophies, methodologies & tools) of delivering products and services at a higher velocity as compared to traditional SDLC methodologies – now, I always like to add a statement that Velocity without quality is of little use – and that’s where the question of testing comes up.

There has always been a confusion (to say the least) about the role of testing or testers in the DevOps world.

While ‘continuous testing’ and ‘quality engineering’ are some phrases that have taken a front seat when it comes to DevOps – one always wonders where to draw the line. How to assess how much QA is actually needed, and in which phase, or is there really a phase?

Whilst Shift Left is what everyone is talking about, what does that actually entail? And then of course we have ‘testing the unexpected’, ‘testing in production’, ‘exploratory testing’ etc., – or Shift Right.

From my experience across multiple enterprises, as they go through the transformation journey from traditional SDLC to DevOps, and while we try to align practices to meet difficult demands from the complexities arising in a true multi-speed IT environment – I have built a perspective.

Shift Left is something that is simpler to implement. The IT community has put in lot of effort into it, in terms of setting up guidelines, tools and frameworks for early validation and verification. More unit and component level testing, early validation of services and techniques like service virtualisation for early integration testing are practiced.

However, it is more about ‘testing the expected’ and does very little for real-time feedback and exploring and base-lining the undefined and unknown. However, this still remains an integral part of the continuous testing framework.

I have read, learnt, experienced and implemented many paradigms of intelligent automation. But, if I have to define it simply, then the features that one should expect from an automation framework in the DevOps world are:

The post Shift Left vs Shift Right practices appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

Continuous testing is growing, but technology and team structures must improve for organisations to gain a competitive advantage, says a new report from on continuous testing from Capgemini and Sogeti, part of the Capgemini Group, in collaboration with Broadcom Inc.’s Enterprise Software Division.

According to the report, continuous testing is gaining ground in large enterprises, with almost a third of IT executives (32%) stating that their IT departments had ‘fully embraced continuous testing’.

However, with 58% of enterprises surveyed deploying a new build daily (and 26% at least hourly), the report highlights that companies must work to improve their continuous testing effectiveness by streamlining their test environment within an agile development ecosystem.

With 58% of enterprises surveyed deploying a new build daily (and 26% at least hourly), continuous testing is becoming a necessary part of the DevOps and agile development ecosystem

Continuous testing report

The report is based on 500 interviews with senior-level IT executives from large and medium-sized companies (over 1,000 employees) in industries including financial services, high tech, healthcare and life sciences, telecommunications, media and entertainment, and manufacturing.

Companies must unlock the potential of automation in testing:

• The study strongly highlights that there is a significant scope to optimise continuous testing processes through technology. It found that automation was only being used to execute 24% of test cases, 24% of end-to-end business scenarios, and to generate 25% of the required test data
• Greater use of automation could significantly improve the velocity of testing activities in the agile teams; for example, over a third (36%) of those surveyed said that more than 50% of testing time is spent searching, managing, maintaining and generating test data. The report recommends that to respond to customer and market needs, all enterprises need to take significant action
• Use cases, detailed in the report, include a leading Australian bank, which had over 5,000 builds for more than 100 applications. By harnessing a single platform for automated build and deployment, integrated with testing and automation tools, it was able to reduce build cycle time by 40%, improve time to market and significantly increase environment uptime.

Enterprises need smarter orchestration and enablement for testing

The self-empowerment of autonomous teams resulted for many enterprises in an uncontrolled landscape with a broad diversity in QA and test automation approaches. To regain control, cites the report, organisations need to improve the central quality enablement of the agile teams with clearer QA guidelines and smarter QA technology provisioning.

A promising development is to make the test orchestration and execution much smarter via artificial intelligence (AI) technologies which provide ‘smart’ test orchestration. With the addition of machine learning capabilities, systems will be able to automatically determine the tests that are required in the release and production cycles.

The report showed a clear need for improved transparency and orchestration in agile testing. Among the executives surveyed, 35% identified a ‘complete audit trail of testing activities’ and a ‘consolidated test and release pipeline’ as the most important test orchestration capabilities, with 32% highlighting a need for a ‘single-place for cross-team collaboration’ and ‘continuous delivery pipeline visibility’.

The shortage of centralised enablement on technology provisioning becomes most apparent when investigating the challenges with test environments. Teams wasted too much time procuring complete test environments. Four in ten (40%) of the respondents said their teams spend more than half of their time building and maintaining their test environments.

Mark Buenen, global leader, digital assurance and testing for the Capgemini Group, said: “The next two to three years will be a critical time for continuous testing as organisations need to solve the dilemma of transitioning to self-empowered autonomous teams where quality is everyone’s responsibility, while improving the central quality support and central quality oversight to create an agile development environment, that is truly able to deliver value in an increasingly complex IT landscape.

“This report clearly demonstrates the need to expand the levels of test automation, make provisioning of test environments and test data smarter, implementing meaningful quality metrics and smart quality dashboards as the core focus areas.”

Inter-disciplinary teams require new skills and support

In the last three to five years, the roles of both developers and testers have evolved significantly. According to the report, developers are now much closer to the customer, with a prominent role in shaping the user experience, while testers have moved out of siloed teams to work in parallel with developers and business teams, meaning that they are involved much earlier in the development life cycle.

The roles and responsibilities of developers and testers are blurring, but clearly it remains important to have QA and test focused experts in the agile teams.

These inter-disciplinary teams mark a move forward, but also create challenges, details the report. They require every team member to have a holistic understanding of the entire process, with testers needing to upgrade their technical skills. Companies must address the requirement for up-skilling and a new, integrated approach to truly achieve continuous testing’s full potential.

Ashok Reddy, senior vice president and general manager, enterprise software division at Broadcom, said: “It’s difficult to fully capitalise on the benefits of agile and DevOps without continuous test automation, which enables organisations to leverage data and intelligence to accelerate the creation of high quality software at the pace of digital business.

“As the chasm between IT and business leaders continues to close, new DevOps practices and techniques, such as automating continuous testing processes, will begin to emerge as necessary tools to drive digital transformation in a hyper-competitive marketplace.”

The report can be downloaded here.

The post Fragmented test automation landscape slows adoption of continuous testing appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

Despite this, the skill set of a manual tester is still needed. According to Brijesh Deb, Agile Testing Evangelist and High Tech Test Manager at Sogeti, this is simply because it is impossible to have zero manual intervention. Every software, be it a mobile app or a component of the NASA rocket, would have to go through some kind of a manual test at some level, at least.

Nevertheless, it appears that not all testers have the skill set to carry out automation tests.

Deb commented: “Test automation is a far bigger animal with a much greater scope where everything from the inception, to the design to the coding, everything is done through automation.

Testing evolution

“The quality parameters have changed with a lot of additional weight now being given to non-functional parameters such as performance and security.

“What this means is that the skill set of the testers has also had to evolve. With this changing outlook of the software testing industry and the evolution in testing, it is imminent that testers add automation to their repertoire as manual testing alone is not going to be enough.

“About a decade or so ago, there was a lot of impetus being given to UI tests and UI was the primary candidate for automation alongside regression tests. Despite this, manual testing can be ubiquitous as the tests and code written for automation are, typically, written manually.”

Furthermore, Anand Bagmar, Founder of Essence Testing, believes automation is NOT the only skill for a tester to contribute and be effective.

”There are many other areas where they can add value – but they need to be able to learn, understand and show a willingness to get close to technology and code – that is non-negotiable from my perspective,” Bagmar added.

Skills & capabilities

In order to build good quality software that will give value to the users of that functionality and in-turn, the creator of the product as well, Bagmar recommends testers must have the following skills and capabilities:

• Have a testing-mindset
• Understand and radiate risk
• Be smart and effective in ways of working
• Optimise where possible
• Evolve in learning and understanding
• Ability/willingness/freedom to experiment and learn from what works well, or not
• Collaborate with all relevant roles for deeper and shared understanding.

(Check out useful steps to take when tweaking test automation processes here!) 

Deb continued: “Most of the time teams try to write code for tests which are executable manually and call it test automation. What confuses this, even more, is the testing vs checking debate.

“Be it the approach of testing the software manually or with automated tests, one common skill the testers must possess is “Test Craftsmanship”. Test Craftsmanship is a combination of the right testing mindset, with the knowledge of various testing tools and techniques. For manual testing, a solid grounding in test craftsmanship i.e., right testing mindset and the knowledge of various test design techniques might just be enough as it is more procedural in nature.

“Automation testing, on the other hand, requires knowledge of additional tool and languages for the tool to work. Depending on the context, both approaches serve different purposes and are equally important.”

DevOps & continuous delivery

Since the last decade, the focus is moving really quickly to DevOps. This means continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) is absolutely impossible without continuous testing (CT). Yet, the fastest (or only) way to achieve CT is through test automation.

“In the fast-moving delivery and release life-cycles, manual testing does not provide much value. We need to focus on a healthy combination of exploratory testing and test automation (of all applicable types) to be effective as a team to build a good quality product. Any test that is important to be re-executed over a period of time needs to be automated at an appropriate level in test automation,” added Bagmar.

“While there is so much focus on test automation, one of the hindering factors for testers from taking up test automation as a career option is the ‘Fear of Code’”.

Since test automation involves writing code that involves accurate knowledge of one or more programming language(s), this scares a lot of engineers, according to Deb. There is a common misconception in the testing world that testers normally do not have access to the code and are more often than not involved in black box testing. So, there is no need to actually learn to programme.

“What testers do not realise is the fact that the knowledge of code will help them, investigate defects, debug errors and expand their avenues more by helping them find the unknown. Testing IMO is more than just finding defects. It is about finding the unknown and helping make the software better,” continued Deb.

Technology involvement

The most important skill required from the tester is the ability to get hands-on involved in technology. This involvement can be at various levels according to Bagmar:

• Be able to understand/read code and make sense out of the same (logic)
• Be able to understand/read the existing automated tests to know what “intents” have been automated – this reduces waste by having to repeat the same intent-validations manually
• Do effective gap-analysis based on what has already been automated, and what would add additional value if automated. Thus, the knowledge of what does not need to be automated, hence focus on more deeper learning, understanding and exploration using human-mind
• Contribute to enhancing automated test suite (unit/integration, API, UI/end-2-end /performance/security/etc.)
• Contribute to building a more testable and functional architecture.

Bagmar also noted that organisations are evolving as they see value from more deeper involvement from the testers in all phases of the software life-cycle. “Testers need to evolve in this direction or else they will be in trouble”.

His blog on “Career Path of a Tester!” highlights more areas where a tester can contribute and grow in areas of building a good quality product – check it out!

Written by Leah Alger

The post Testers knowledge towards automation skills appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

DevOps goes hand in hand with other well-known practices such as agile and continuous delivery. The need for DevOps arose from the increasing success of agile software development, as that led to organisations wanting to release their software faster and more frequently. DevOps and continuous delivery share a common background in agile methods and lean thinking: small and frequent changes with focused value to the end customer.

To facilitate DevOps we use automated tools for each and every part of the product development stages (code, build, test, package, release, configure and monitoring).

To help the DevOps pipeline in an organisation, many software delivery institutions have now embarked on test automation. With proper test automation tools and practices implemented we are able to test and deliver software with high quality. At the same time, there are a lot of repercussion and nightmares that organisations will face when undertaking a wrong test automation strategy.

Utilise test automation

We all deliver web solutions to our customers. Facebook, Google, Amazon and Microsoft are some of the leading software giants who deliver web-based solutions to billions of users worldwide. These solutions utilise web services and sometimes microservices architectures. Therefore, we embark first on the development of these web services before putting the final UI touches on the system. To facilitate faster delivery we should first automate the testing of such web services rather than waiting for the UI to be integrated into the delivery feature. We should use more web services test automation tools and test frameworks to extensively test web services and microservices architecture. It is a good practice to have more test coverage on web services rather than with a UI based functional test.

The more test issues we see at the foundation level more will be better off in the final stages of testing. These tests should look at testing the web service alone, test web services by integrating with other web services, and test against the contracts established. Web service testing can be automated with tools like RestAssured, Kataloon Studio, Postman and Karate. These are well-known tools in the industry. Web service testing should not limit to functional aspects. It should also be used for performance and security aspects. Tools like JMeter, Load UI and TestingWhiz can be used to test the performance of a web service.

Facilitate continuous delivery

In DevOps, we emphasise on continuous delivery. To facilitate continuous delivery we use continuous integration. Most of us do wrong when using continuous integration for test automation. We only push UI functional automation suite to the continuous integration. Where our automated regression will have to wait until the delivery of new option with UI. We should move away with such practice. The best way is to push our service level automated test into the continuous integration. This allows maximum leverage of our test automation practice. The automated security test at services level should also move into the CI process, which allows us to identify any security risks at earlier stages of development.

Use of the ‘behavioral driven development’ (BDD) approach is another area that also helps application development and automated test development. BDD facilitates creating development code as well as automated code, to what is actually required by the customer, thus eliminating any requirements gaps in delivery and also reworking. We should have a practice where we write automation scripts based on the scenarios (features) accepted by the customers. There are so many add-ons we can utilise for our test automation framework to facilitate BDD. Cucumber for Java and JavaScript, RSpec for Ruby and SpecFlow for .net are some of the add-ons that help this integration.

Codeless testing

We should have a test automation strategy to automate test quickly to keep in phase with the delivery pipeline. Rather than opting for tools that need extensive automation coding, it’s a good practice that we use tools that needs less coding or simply codeless. This helps us to reduce our effort on test automation and speed up the test process. Codeless test automation also helps non-technical quality assurance teams to get involved in test automation with no background in coding knowledge. If they know how to test, they can automate. To put codeless test automation into practice we can use test automation tools like Leap Test, Testim.io or TestCraft.

Machine learning and the use of artificial intelligence (AI) is also an area of focus today, as it will help the teams to bring down testing effort and speed up delivery with high quality. The AI-based test tool should be capable to come up with the test scenarios for a feature, with maximum coverage and design the test automation scripts for it, execute when necessary. There are two great AI automation tools available in the industry. Namely, Appvance IQ and Mabl. With Appvance you can create 1500 test cases in just 5 seconds; a dramatic improvement in testing.

Operating systems

To enhance our DevOps pipeline and to leverage the maximum of test automation we should also utilise the cloud-based testing solutions. These solutions enable us to test against a wider range of operating systems, mobile devices and even web browsers, which we cannot have in-house due to high investment and maintenance cost. Automated testing in such solutions helps to assure that the application delivered works on different platforms and environments. The solutions can utilise our BrowserStack, CrossBrowser Testing, Sauce Labs and Perfecto Cloud.

Another way we can help faster testing, and high-quality delivery is to use tools to help manual testers do more in-depth debugging, helping hunt down more hidden bugs. Tools like Postman and Fiddler helps us to debug web services more in a drill down fashion.

We should also keep in mind that our test automation suite should have the maximum code coverage of the application being tested. There should be more emphasis on code coverage tools like NCover, dotCover, Atlassian Clover and Cobertura. Looking at test automation code coverage helps us to ensure that our test automation code validates most parts of the application.

DevOps success

With DevOps, a test automation engineer’s role expands as they perform more of a developer role. They will have to create automated unit tests to test the developer code and they perform a test drive approach. Automated unit testing is another area where test engineers can embark upon. Therefore, the quality engineering team should work on TestNG, Junit, Mockito and Powermock.

So adding the final points, we need test automation to facilitate DevOps, as it’s a major contributor to DevOps success. So these tweaks that I have highlighted in this article serves a lot of DevOps practitioners around the world to put the ship safely to the sea and start cursing at maximum speeds.

Written by Senior QA Consultant at Virtusa, Kushan Shalindra Amarasiri

The post Useful steps to take when tweaking test automation processes appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

DevOps

The DevOps paradigm and continuous delivery have led to a digital shake-up for enterprise IT. With DevOps comes a new kind of agility, compressed release cycles, enhanced application quality and above all a renewed synergy between development and operations. This breaking of barriers is essential to match the transformation journey.

Yet, it is not just speed and quality; the business value of DevOps is quite remarkable. It evolves the paradigm of continuous integration to continuous development. Simply put, the code that is written and committed to version control is now being built, developed, tested and installed in the production environment for consumption. This helps the entire ecosystem because environments and processes become standardised and every action in this chain becomes automated.

Software testing role becomes crucial here as ‘test early, test frequently’ is the key to achieving better quality software for DevOps teams. This requires the effective use of key enablers like test automation, continuous integration, capability for continuous feedback and the right mix of tools and process for DevOps.

Test automation

But with great power comes great responsibility. Testing is one of the key pieces in the continuous delivery puzzle and organisations are now scaling up their agile and DevOps services toward continuous testing and continuous delivery. There is high pressure to fix defects urgently, in order to reduce the technical debt and achieve the pace that is set by agile and DevOps thinking.

Thus, as companies shorten their sprint cycles and increase their release velocity, testing must match both the high frequency and volume needs. Manual testing is simply not enough to accomplish this pace. Test Automation is one of the key drivers for DevOps and digital transformation. greatly increases your coverage and accuracy.

Test automation is at the heart of your CI/CD pipeline to achieve the coverage and accuracy. From faster feedback loops, reduced expenses, reusability, organisation and faster time to market, automated testing vastly improves your efficiency and overall quality.

Artificial intelligence & machine learning

Modern test management has the advantage of information. The vast amounts of test data and results produced by their test automation suites hold valuable insights and intelligence. And while it is manually impossible to wade through all this data, BOTs can quickly analyse terabytes of information. BOT-enabled tools can then produce actionable insights and optimisation recommendations. These analytics are useful to detect and reduce/remove performance bottlenecks and also identify areas of most failed scenarios or tips/insights on critical areas.

Artificial intelligence, machine learning and the use of BOTs have emerged as the major disruptive forces in the current digital landscape. By leveraging the power of AI and ML in their test automation efforts, businesses can significantly increase their ability to fulfil time to market pressures while also meeting the stringent quality needed for desired business outcomes. These AI-and ML-led smarter test automation solutions – also known as intelligent testing will be the core differentiators in achieving frictionless automation and continuous feedback.

Unified testing platforms

The organic progression of software testing organisations has led to the use of various legacy tools and processes, and teams with a wide variety of scripting languages and methods. This weighs down the test automation efforts as it leads to duplicity of efforts, lack of reusability and high maintenance overheads. The cumulative outcome is increased the time to market and non-optimisation of software quality.

DevOps and digital transformation have set the pace for a highly proactive, fast and integrated delivery culture. The confidence in the quality and timeliness of releases requires a unified approach that transcends the siloes and barriers. This has led to the era of tightly integrated, unified testing platforms that address various testing needs and challenges under one umbrella. Modern, unified solutions provide a holistic test management solution that optimizes the testing cycle with end-to-end coverage and integrates with your existing automation, CI/CD tools and project management tools.

Predictive & prescriptive quality analytics

Delivering quality at the speed of business is a digital imperative. This needs businesses to define the requirements clearly, use the right infrastructure, and use established processes. AI and ML algorithms have made it possible to mine large volumes of data from automation suites and test management tools to gain insights and intelligence. Predictive analytics can help you shorten the testing cycles by optimising your process, anticipate defects early and set the priorities for testing that will have the greatest impact.

Prescriptive analytics goes one step further and makes automation smarter by providing a holistic view of root causes and failures, heat map-visualisations and providing recommendations that are both actionable and accurate.

The game changer

Delivering software quality continuously is the need of the day in the era of digital transformation. As the lines continue to blur with DevOps and agile practices enabling more fluid and transparent work practices, integration and visibility are essential for effective test management. Software test automation holds the power to increase your coverage, depth and scope and solve many of the prevalent challenges.

But it is intelligent test automation that is the real game-changer, with its power of data, AI and machine learning. Intelligent testing takes quality engineering to the next level in the DevOps context by giving you an unparalleled competitive advantage. That of optimising testing activities, instant feedback, faster data-driven decisions and self-adaptive software testing for your quality lifecycle. Smarter testing led by AI and BOTs has beckoned the third wave in the software testing ecosystem.

Written by Rutesh Shah, CEO, Infostretch Corp

The post 5 key drivers for software testing in 2018: driving the digital change 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.

CLICK HERE TO READ ONLINE

NEWS

DOES AI REPLACE OR ASSIST?

To find out what effect AI has on tech-savvy individuals, Test Magazine reporter, Leah Alger, receives vitalizing views from an array of software testers.

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

THE RACE AGAINST TIME: GDPR AND ITS IMPACT ON TEST MANAGEMENT

Santhosh CV, practice manager, Quality Engineering and Transformation (QET), Nordics , TCS, explores why GDPR is an important piece of EU law making which will have a major impact on the software testing world.

RISK MANAGEMENT: IS YOUR SOFTWARE PROTECTED?

Nadine du Toit, Head of Managed and Professional Services at DVT Global Testing Solutions, argues that software risk management is vital and that traditional insurance morphs into a different paradigm when applied to software.

APPIUM AND MOBILE TEST AUTOMATION: 3 THINGS TO CONSIDER WHEN GETTING STARTED

With all the industry buzz around Appium, what do enterprise mobility teams need to consider when getting started using this test automation framework? Dan McFall, President of Mobile Labs reveals the top three areas that mobility professionals must consider to be Appium ready.

TEST AUTOMATION: THE RIGHT WAY IS UP

DevOps is driving the adoption of wider test automation, argues Jonny Fletcher, Test Architect, ROQ.

SUPPLIER PROFILE

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION REQUIRES A HOLISTIC APPROACH TO QUALITY AND FOCUS ON USER EXPERIENCE

Yoav Ziv, Amdocs Head of Testing, perhaps more than most, knows about the importance of software quality. A 20+ year veteran of the telecom business, Yoav now leads the team that helps guide Amdocs’ customers through the challenges of adapting quality processes to the demands of the digital age.

TEST AUTOMATION

MACHINE LEARNING AND SOFTWARE TESTING: PARALLEL LINES OR DESINED TO MEET?

Assaf Dudai, Head of Content at BrightInfo, highlights how software testing can benefit from machine learning.

ERPS AND AUTOMATION TEST DATA

Automating an ERP product has a profound impact on the automation architecture. In his experience, Ali Khalid, Automation Lead at Asset Works, says one of the most challenging aspects is test data. The highly complex and integrated business logic of ERPs coupled with configurable workflows makes ERP’s test data very difficult to manage. Here, Khalid explains different methods of handling test data, some of which would work well for less complex applications.

EXPLORATORY TESTING

EXPLORATORY, AGILE AND AUTOMATED: THE TESTERS CHALLENGE

Exploratory testing has been around since 1984. But how does it fit into today’s world of software development? Is it an alternative to agile testing? Or does it complement it? Where does automation fit in? Mark Thomas, CEO and experienced developer of Coderus, gives us his thoughts.

FINANCE

PROTECTING AND CONNECTING THE MONEY

Andrew Holt looks at the important relationship between software testing and financial services companies .

IT ACADEMY 

PART OF THE ACADEMY

Being a test professional means having to be creative, distil fact from fiction, articulate impacts and analyse patterns. In an attempt to focus and expand on these qualities, Mark Galvin, Systems Assurance Manager, developed and created the University of Cambridge IT Academy. He shares his thinking and the benefits for the industry here.

CROWD TESTING

TESTING: THE KEY TO AGILE SUCCESS

Dean Vittum, Senior Technical Sales Engineer at Applause, argues that a commitment to agile is an investment worth the effort

SOFTWARE TESTING CONFERENCE (NORTH)

Two years ago we launched the ‘Northern’ conference in the beautiful city of York to help those within the community that were located further afield, and what a success it has been.

Our main aim throughout through conference is to bring together the software testing and QA community and as such professionals that recognise the crucial importance of quality within the software development lifecycle will attend this wonderful event

In the magazine you will find a welcome programme, a list of sponsors and speakers, and the floor plan of the conference.

20 TESTING PROVIDERS

Following on from previous years, the 20 Leading Testing Providers 2017 guide outlining different, selected software testing and quality assurance products and services was published in the September 2017 issue. The software testing landscape changes rapidly and we find that an annual update on the marketplace is a good starting place as you consider purchase decisions going forward.

ABOUT TEST MAGAZINE

TEST Magazine was specifically created as a voice for the modern-day software testing and quality assurance professional. Launched in 2008 and distributed to an audience over 14,000, the publication provides news, features and practical, as well as professional advice on all facets of software testing. TEST Magazine is widely regarded as the leading journal for software testing and quality assurance in Europe and beyond.

WANT TO WRITE FOR TEST MAGAZINE?

Get in touch by emailing TEST Magazine Reporter, leah.alger@31media.co.uk, or editor@31media.co.uk.

Written by Leah Alger

The post The September issue of TEST Magazine is now online appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

Enhancing customer experience through automating key aspects of the testing process

Domino’s Pizza’s e-commerce operation accounts for 69.4% of all delivered sales in the UK & ROI, and therefore it comes as no surprise that the company is always looking to enhance its customer experience. Its ambitious plans include introducing more technology innovations, which means adopting a continuous IT delivery methodology and automating key aspects of the testing process, including regression testing. Hitachi Consulting will also supply DevOps consultancy, as Domino’s Pizza looks to grow cross-team collaboration and take advantage of cloud infrastructure and DevOps tools.

“We’ve got a truly collaborative relationship between Domino’s Pizza and Hitachi Consulting,” says Rod Brooks, Domino’s Pizza’s Head of IT (Software Delivery). “With our eye constantly on innovation, we are always seeking ways to make our customers lives easier. So, it’s important to have the capability to become more agile and have the scalability to keep ahead of the competition. Hitachi Consulting provides us with that capability, but in turn we’re able to share our experiences, as a rapidly growing e-commerce and m-commerce business.

“Working with Hitachi Consulting also means we have access to the company’s knowledge and experience in other areas, such as cloud architecture, business intelligence and enterprise IT,” adds Brooks.

Challenge of ensuring new applications are rolled-out quickly, but are also well-tested and customer-ready

“Domino’s Pizza is a fast-growing company that harnesses technology to keep it ahead of the competition, but this creates challenges of their own in terms of ensuring that new applications are rolled-out quickly, but are also well-tested and customer-ready,” Chris Saul, Vice President of Digital, EMEA, Hitachi Consulting said. “We are delighted to be able to increase the IT function’s capabilities in this area, while having the opportunity for our team to work for a successful, dynamic business that understands how IT can be an enabler, not just a resource.”

“With DevOps, there is a strong focus on continuous testing and constant delivery. This means there is more emphasis on testing much earlier in the solution delivery lifecycle. Domino’s Pizza has embraced continuous integration and testing to help the software delivery team rapidly build, test, and deliver secure, high-quality applications,” Jonathon Wright, Director, Testing Quality Assurance, at Hitachi Consulting commented.

The post Domino’s Pizza working with Hitachi Consulting to ensure continuous integration and testing of applications appeared first on DevOps Online North America.