Cynthia Dunlop & Wayne Ariola, Parasoft
Now that rapid delivery of differentiable software has become a business imperative, software development teams are scrambling to keep up. In response to increased demand, they are seeking new ways to accelerate their release cycles—driving the adoption of agile or lean development practices such as DevOps. Yet, based on the number of software failures now making headlines on a daily basis, it’s evident that speeding up the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) opens the door to severe repercussions.
Organizations are remiss to assume that yesterday’s practices can meet today’s process demands. There needs to be a cultural shift from testing an application to understanding the risks associated with a release candidate. Such a shift requires moving beyond the traditional “bottom-up” approach to testing, which focuses on adding incremental tests for new functionality. While this will always be required, it’s equally important to adopt a top-down approach to mitigating business risks. This means that organizations must defend the user experience with the most likely use cases in the context of non-functional requirements—continuously.
In order for more advanced automation to occur, we need to move beyond the test pass/fail percentage into a much more granular understanding of the impact of failure: a nuance that gets lost in the traditional regression test suite. Continuous Testing is key for bridging this gap. Continuous Testing brings real-time assessments, objective go/no-go quality gates, and continuous measurements to refine the development process so that business expectations are continuously met. Ultimately, Continuous Testing resets the question from “are you done testing?” to “is the level of risk understood and accepted?” This paper is designed to help software development leaders understand how a new perspective on “test” can help them accelerate the SDLC and release with confidence.
Target Audience: Introductory
2015 Technical Paper, Cynthia Dunlop & Wayne Ariola, Paper, Slides, Notes, Video.
