Test Automation

Why is Test Automation Important for CI/CD?

Last updated on June 23rd, 2022 at 04:29 am

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The software industry is adopting modern software development practices to make their testing more effective. With the increasing need for faster release cycles, companies are shifting to Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD). Continuous deployment requires continuous testing, so to ensure a sturdy pipeline, they need to follow the DevOps approach. There are numerous benefits of automation testing that can be utilized in the efforts to ensure faster and quality product releases. But teams tend to neglect these when implementing the CI/CD pipeline. By leveraging automation, teams can achieve most of their testing efforts. An automation testing company makes it easier for companies to switch to DevOps methodologies. 

CI and CD Approach 

When organizations plan to maximize their CI/CD efforts, it is essential for them to automate their tests. Since CD involves delivering new code releases at a faster speed to customers, automated testing becomes necessary to attain this goal. It is not possible to automate tests if there are manual and time-consuming steps within the software delivery process. Continuous Delivery is independent of CI. CI is all about running automated tests against new changes and verification of these changes so that they do not affect the features or give birth to new bugs. CI and CD both need to be combined to get the maximum results. 

Automated testing aims at ensuring quality at each stage of the software development process. It ensures that no bugs appear in the software app so that it can be ready for deployment without any delays. 

Should Automation Testing be Skipped in CI/CD Pipeline?

Have you ever wondered about the downsides of skipping automated testing in the CD pipeline? Development teams depend on automation frameworks, and it becomes challenging to assess if testing teams are compatible with adapting these frameworks. It can affect the scalability of a software delivery process but if it can achieve effectiveness in testing when integrated with the continuous delivery chain. 

Why is Test Automation Important?

If a QA team is developing complex software and looking to speed up CI/CD, then it is possible to implement test automation in the right manner. Following are a few reasons why test automation is necessary to achieve success in the CI/CD pipeline:

Handling Small Changes Easily: 

QA teams will also require manual testing and combine with automation testing such as usability testing, in cases where a major change is made to an application. Since there are small changes in updates and code integrations, test automation requires some manual testing to deliver a steady workflow to ensure that these small chunks are thoroughly tested. 

Consistent Results:

In order to ensure an effective CI/CD pipeline, QA teams have to make slight variations. Automation testing enables QA experts to achieve consistent results and ensure that customer expectations are met throughout the delivery pipeline. 

Faster Tests:

In the CD approach, speed is of the essence to ensure minimal delays. With automation testing, results can be achieved much more quickly as compared to manual testing. Testers can also enable parallel automation testing to shorten the testing duration. 

More Agile:

Teams should use different frameworks, configurations, and tools to ensure a robust CI pipeline. Manual testing often causes a hindrance in agile environments. Thus, test automation teams no longer have to hold on to rewrite tests when a change or update is required. Test automation supports reconfiguration automatically. 

Should Organizations Delay Test Automation?

Development teams realize that they need to shift to the CI/CD approach, and they can begin with small steps. For instance, regression tests can be useful to overcome challenges and strengthen teams are they use test automation tools. This can be beneficial for teams and investing in the right automation framework can be suitable for a test environment. 

Keeping in view the above-mentioned benefits of test automation, and automation testing company should be hired to achieve faster and quality product releases. In a CI/CD pipeline, the right automation testing framework combined with manual testing efforts can help achieve success. The best teams and companies tend to use automated tests, that help an organization in delivering reliable products to the end-users. If DevOps is not backed up by automated tests, it can affect software quality a great deal. Automated tests give more power and flexibility to the teams and minimize the manual testing efforts and maintenance. It results in providing faster delivery of quality products to attain customer satisfaction.