June 14, 2019

5 Reasons Why You Shouldn't Stitch Together Testing in the DevOps Pipeline

Continuous Testing

DevOps

You can throw together a dinner or piece together weekend plans. But, you should never, ever “stitch together” the continuous testing process of the DevOps pipeline.

Yet, many companies do just that.

They end up with an infrastructure that stitches together a number of disconnected tools and components. For instance, they might have different labs for mobile and web testing. And, those may have separate reporting processes.

Such a disjointed testing process in the DevOps workflow leads to teams spending significant amounts of time creating and maintaining integrations between tools and underlying infrastructure.

Over time, these integrations become yet another time-consuming, non-core activity. It negatively impacts their ability to achieve high-velocity delivery.

Here are the top five reasons why teams should never piece their continuous testing processes together. Keep reading to learn why — and see if any of these sound familiar to you.

5 Reasons Why You Should Never Piece Together Your Testing Process

1. There Is No Single Point of Failure

All pieces of the continuous testing process rely on each other. When one fails, they all do. If you don’t create your test scripts correctly, execution will be a nightmare. Reporting relies on execution. Execution relies on the lab.

Logistically, having a stitched-together continuous testing process complicates compliance for DevOps teams. With so many tools, information can slip through the cracks. It leaves room for error.

And, even if your DIY continuous testing process worked for your last release, it may not work for the next one. Time-consuming maintenance is required to make sure all areas of testing in the DevOps workflow are up to date and functioning. As the product evolves, your processes will too. And, that affects the entire DevOps pipeline.

2. It’s Time Consuming

As you may have guessed, it's more time consuming to stitch together testing solutions yourself.

Your product never stands still. Each iteration has new features. And, that means that you’ll continuously evolve your pieced-together continuous testing solution within the DevOps pipeline.

You also need to consider the fact that DevOps is made up of microservices. Each product squad is responsible for an individual component. They may be responsible for connectivity, codeless testing, or for analytics. Each product squad therefore has their own unique requirements, which all need to be supported by technology.

That’s a lot of time, energy, and resources for teams to invest. And, it takes them away from the core of their job: creating and releasing great web and mobile apps.

3. It’s More Expensive than a Unified Solution

Not only are stitched-together testing processes time consuming and prone to failure, but they are also more expensive.

It takes a significant amount of time to support and maintain the infrastructure of a pieced-together DevOps workflow. The administrative time it takes team members to maintain their tools cuts into productivity. And, that is costing teams.

For example, resources are hired to stitch together solutions to enable product development. But, without a reliable testing process, the work can’t get done. So, time is wasted on implementing and maintaining the infrastructure needed for product development.

4. It’s Keeping You From Maturing Your DevOps & CI/CD Process

DevOps teams often use an array of tools — each serving a different function of the DevOps pipeline. When teams have fragmented toolchains, it creates gaps in automation. These slow down DevOps teams and keep them from running at an optimized pace. It also holds them back from maturing their CI/CD process.

As a result of having to maintain a multitude of tools, teams that need to move fast are unable to do so. Consider these instances:

An urgent patch.
A pressing bug fix release.
A new and crucial deployment.

In cases such as these, teams find themselves scrambling. They cannot build, deploy, and release as quickly as they need to because they lack the necessary infrastructure. Features get postponed because teams are too busy stitching tools together. It takes time to maintain an array of tools. It cuts into resources, and it keeps you from maturing your CI/CD process.

5. You’ll Have Little to No Visibility

Patching up the continuous testing process yourself with different tools and processes means that you’ll have little to no end-to-end visibility.

When you have multiple squads working on technical features, how do you aggregate all of those into a single pane of glass? How can you make critical decisions without the help of a quality dashboard? It’s hard combining all this information together into one place yourself — a process that’s certainly not quick enough to provide fast feedback.

Without proper visibility, teams will be ill-equipped to brace for change — resulting in delays. From a management standpoint, it’s a nightmare for understanding where the bottlenecks are, which bars effective decision-making.

Why a Unified Testing Solution is Better

As you can see, trying to stitch together solutions to achieve continuous testing has many downfalls. A unified solution can help you overcome them and provide you with additional benefits.

To start, a unified solution offers superior support and compatibility overall. Getting support for end-to-end features is far more efficient than getting the same across disjointed components with no straight-forward integration.

Additionally, a unified solution enables a high degree of test automation, which eliminates business risks. This is especially true when compared to stitched-together solutions that take engineers away from their core objectives in order to deal with infrastructure.

Lastly, a unified continuous testing solution also benefits different personas. This is because it’s easier for different practitioners to work on a single solution rather than “fighting” with multiple technologies to accomplish the same thing. If this problem is not addressed, it only grows over time.

Bottom Line

As you can see, stitching together the testing process of the DevOps pipeline comes with plenty of problems. That’s why a unified continuous testing solution is the smart choice for fast-moving, innovative, Agile teams.

But, it’s not just a unified continuous testing solution that you need. It’s a unified solution that’s available in the cloud. The cloud allows you to scale as your product grows. It supports the DevOps workflow and offers the accessibility needed for expansive, global teams, while providing enterprise-grade security. Additionally critical, unified solutions provide the stability that dev and QA teams need to work efficiently.

Perfecto has been architected from the ground up as a cohesive platform unifying DevOps tools and underlying test infrastructure. For instance, both mobile and web resources are part of one global lab. All test results are aggregated in one pane of glass — Perfecto’s Smart Reporting and Analytics.

The portal delivers a unified view, accelerating feedback loops and digital delivery at scale. And, it’s the only platform to address the four key pillars of continuous testing: test creation, execution, a cloud-based lab, and test results analysis.

Want to learn more? Check out the Perfecto Platform to see for yourself the power of a unified DevOps solution.

Perfecto Platform

Mobile & Web Test Coverage Guide