3. Testing is a continuous process, not a destination
As we’ve established, when testing occurs at the final stage of a production cycle, testing becomes a bottleneck that results in lower quality and longer production times.
That’s where test automation and continuous testing comes in. Building an automated testing platform requires an up-front cost that many organizations balk at. However, consider a construction analogy: If the product you’re building is a skyscraper, an automated testing platform is the scaffolding that must be built before a single brick is laid.
With that “scaffolding” in place, organizations can deploy code every 10 minutes rather than every two hours or two months. This produces feedback and results faster, making it easier to identify mistakes. Since testing can occur in real time, it allows the DevOps team to focus on developing new features and lower the cost of testing in the long run. Over time, the process streamlines, resulting in continuous, incremental improvements that create quality and efficiency — ultimately, a better product.
But to view automated testing as merely an efficiency and speed play misses the point. When mundane tasks like testing checklists are automated, the team is freed up to focus on a higher level of quality in development and customized manual tests. The results of optimized, automated QA and testing influence how the development team writes new clean code that can easily fit into the testing structure.