How to Do Continuous Testing: Everything You Need to Know

In the age of automation, things move fast. Testing early and often is the key to staying competitive. For that reason, continuous testing is becoming a must-have for today's teams.

Don't let testing hold you back. Keep reading to learn what continuous testing is, how it can benefit your team, and much more.

Consider this your guide on how to do continuous testing.

So, what is continuous testing and why is it the next evolution of test automation? It is the principle of testing early, often, and everywhere in an automated way. By reducing risk and removing the testing bottleneck, continuous testing improves efficiencies across the entire DevOps pipeline.

By executing automated tests as a part of the software delivery pipeline, the continuous testing benefits are numerous. For starters, testing is much more efficient when done at each stage of software development. This is key for managers and developers by ensuring the right tests are being conducted at the right times.

Test automation is critical for today's DevOps teams. But what is the difference between continuous testing vs test automation? While automation testing does improve test coverage and efficiency, continuous testing takes those benefits even further by executing automated tests as a part of the software delivery pipeline.

Agile and continuous go together so it makes sense to automate test activities into every commit. Continuous testing in Agile is the type of testing that increases confidence in the application quality and drives team efficiency.

Software testing tools are evolving and it is important to map the tools that match both the practitioners’ skills and their testing type. Based on three personas (business tester, software developer in test, and software developer), it's important to consider how testing types should be dispersed, which tools they should use, and the key benefits to continuous testing when mapped correctly.