CI Pipeline (conceptual view from QA perspective)
We need to cover below tests at-least (automatically the first five) to say that CI is working
1.Unit Tests — Most of the time this is considered responsibility of the developer , BAs and QAs can help in this , if they are involved .
A test case developed first for the development of function to be implemented (like a Test driven development) , is certain to give better quality code and less effort later on Demo meetings to explain functionality to stake holders .
2.Smoke Tests — This is basically a quick test to make sure the function is available .
3.Integration Tests — These tests can be executed in order to understand the impact of new implementations on the dependents , which gives us early view of backward compatibility.
4.System Tests — This is where , we understand the impact of changes on the application functionality as a whole , benefits and flaws on the business application of the newly implemented changes.
5.Regression Tests — This keeps on growing like the world population , as the business and application grows , they are very important to ascertain that quality of code is maintained with ever growing demands for quick fix and changes , this has to be as stable as possible and needs to be monitored regularly , frequent failures in regression will indicate , the lack of flexibility in the architecture , to incorporate new changes or the automation is not been looked after , that can be due to higher workloads on testing team or less visibility of its impact to them .
6.Acceptance tests — This is where customer will use the application and show his happy face , if not , we need to improve processes further to make him smile …
These steps are very basic and sounds pretty simple but keeping these appraised frequently with the team is only way to maintain software quality and teams confidence high !!
Only when we revisit these we get the important data for training needs , upcoming technologies and process improvements..
I wanted to write about it , to give beginners an idea , as usually with CI some of us directly jumps to tools implementing them , rather than understanding the rationale behind them , which can go a long way to help us , improve software delivery …
Each of these areas can have loads of information on the internet , we need to break it down as per needs and use them for effectiveness in our software delivery process.