Organizations rapidly turn to Continuous Integration (CD) and Continuous Delivery (CD) approaches to thrive in a world where software delivery is not just faster but also calls for measures for quality assurance. While it is hard to say how a software product will address the needs of end-users, continuous delivery works as a bridge between business goals and quality products. The CD pipeline ensures testing all small and frequent changes in an app to ensure how well a product is designed, or new features will perform. Teams use test management tools to integrate the testing process into the CI/CD pipelines.
Let’s have a quick look at the concepts of CD and CI delivery pipeline:
Continuous Delivery (CD) and Continuous Integration (CI)
Continuous delivery (CD) is the process of speeding up the software release process. This approach is used to minimize the risks associated with releasing applications and new features. We realize that releasing software updates is a daunting process but CD ensures reducing the risks associated and that every change made to the code is also tested frequently. QA teams make their development process more efficient and resolve issues quickly that are identified in production.
Continuous integration (CI) is a practice that involves testing code in an application whenever a developer makes a change to it. It speeds up the release process by allowing teams to identify and fix issues earlier and strengthen collaboration between the agile teams. Typically, in a waterfall development environment, developers worked in isolation on different parts of an application and would later integrate with the rest of the team members manually. It would take days or weeks to check if the new code could break anything. Due to this, developers would duplicate their code using different coding strategies and giving birth to new bugs and issues. But in a CI environment, developers update code changes in a shared repository several times a day so that it can be integrated, tested, and validated continuously. By implementing CI/CD, teams speed up their development process and ensure that issues are identified and resolved in the earlier stages of the cycle.
How Do Test Management Tools Help in Integration of Testing Processes in DevOps Environment
It is critical for a business to focus on the quality and speed of their products to achieve success. With well-integrated practices and the right test management tools, a business can ensure faster and better software products. This is only possible when managers create an effective DevOps environment that uses shared tools to ensure a smooth software delivery process. Software testing is a crucial part of a development project, so QA teams integrate DevOps practices, test management tools, and fully automated tests into the cycle. Businesses are now using agile methodologies to accelerate faster and quality software apps.
As businesses evolve and so do software testing practices, there is a dire need to develop and deploy applications across different platforms and it is important to improve collaboration between teams and achieve quality results. Provisioning of test management tools, test automation, and integration of tools in the DevOps environment, help organizations in providing a highly effective environment for efficient team performance.
The first step to speed up a CI/CD pipeline is to adopt the right test management tools. Kualitee is a comprehensive tool that allows the creation of test cases across different applications. It supports a variety of test types that are required in a continuous delivery cycle. QA teams can also integrate Kualitee with tools to ensure the effective flow of communication between developers and testers. It also allows QA to run parallel tests, and provide test environments accordingly. Kualitee has a number of features and integrations allow teams to seamlessly integrate into the development process and help build a CD pipeline. It helps lower the costs and ensures faster and quality product releases.
