Continuous Testing SKILup Day on December 1, 2022, offered insightful sessions, yoga, networking, a sponsor hall and a DevOps-inspired mixology class! 

If you missed the event, we’ve got you covered with a round-up of the top themes from the sessions and conversations around this incredibly important topic.

Why is Continuous Testing Critical for Digital Transformation?

With everything as code, all elements need to be tested and as a consequence, everyone in IT needs to understand continuous testing from a people, process, and automation perspective. The sessions for this SKILup Day explored what continuous testing is and why it’s important, the challenges of continuous testing and how to overcome them and how to implement continuous testing’s prerequisites and patterns for success. 

We’ll review key discussion points from the day in this post.

To recap, Continuous Testing SKILup Day speakers explored:

• Continuous Testing with Tricentis Tosca
• Tiny Tests That Get You Huge Results
• Why Machine Learning Is A Must For Smart Intelligent Testing
• Yes, You Can! Partnership Between Continuous Testing and the Wider ITSM Environment
• How to Overcome Bottlenecks By Accelerating Time-to-Verdicts

Continuous Testing SKILup Day Highlights

Mark Towle, Solutions Architect at Tricentis, joined this SKILup Day with the session “Continuous Testing with Tricentis Tosca.” Towle highlighted that Continuous Testing is an important part of any Quality Assurance journey and since Continuous Testing is not a one size fits all solution, he described the important elements of Continuous Testing for teams to take the next steps forward and how Tricentis can assist. 

Nikolay Advolodkin, Principal Developer Advocate at Sauce Labs, presented the session “Tiny Tests That Get You Huge Results.” In the session, Advolodkin explained Functional e2e tests produce fast, focused, targeted, and reliable feedback for you to use in your software development lifecycle so that you gain insight into what a real user scenario looks like – from start to finish. Advolodkin demonstrated how to create atomic e2e tests with several code examples during a live application demo. 

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Ashish Agrawal, General Manager at Dover Fueling Solutions, shared subject matter expertise during the session “Why Machine Learning Is A Must For Smart Intelligent Testing.” Agrawal identified that Testing has come a long way from slow, manual, and independent Test Automation, which as it expanded alongside product advancement, became difficult to maintain and execute. Agrawal provided a solution to perform Smart Intelligent Testing in a continuous stream to address the need for faster testing feedback and for a smoother flow of deliveries to production in the Agile, DevOps and Digital ecosystems. He presented three case studies that demonstrated optimizing, running analytics and how to conduct defect/ticket fix resolutions.

David ‘Tommo’ Tomlinson, Manager of the DevOps Portfolio at QA, shared key insights during “Yes, You Can! Partnership Between Continuous Testing and the Wider ITSM Environment.” Tomlinson explained Continuous Testing and ITSM concepts, such as Agile Service Management and high-velocity IT, have been around for a while, but they need to work together to provide full value. He highlighted that many organizations’ ITSM practices were originally built for a world of siloed development and big-bang testing and releases, leaving a gatekeeper model legacy. (“We can’t do that, our ITSM team says so.”) He then demonstrated how implementing Continuous Testing can be achieved against the backdrop of a partnership with ITSM practitioners and presented tangible advice to overcome pushback or resistance from process owners

Shivagami Gugan, DevOps Institute Ambassador and SRE and Cloud Architecture Evangelist, provided real-world considerations during the session, “How To Connect DevSecOps, Observability and AIOps To Maximize Business Value.” Gugan emphasized that without AI, Observability is delivering data that misses critical insights. Her session overviewed how AI/AIOps can be harnessed for your data to deliver operational excellence and predictive performance. She also highlighted that fast feedback loops enhance the AI algorithms’ accuracy and explainability.

Gautham Pallapa, DevOps Institute Ambassador and Founder, Transformity and Executive Advisor at VMware, shared subject matter expertise during the session, “Measure What Matters: Pick The Right Metrics For Success.” Pallapa provided key insights into how to identify the measures that matter and tell your success story from a value-delivery perspective. He indicated that technical metrics do not tell the whole story. He then presented a value-centric framework that aligns teams on the definition of success and measures how work performance translates to customer delight and business outcome success.

Marc Hornbeek, a.k.a., DevOps-the-Gray Esq., CEO at Engineering DevOps Consulting, presented the session, “How to Overcome Bottlenecks By Accelerating Time-to-Verdicts.” Hornbeek indicated that each stage in the value stream involves testing and this is often the biggest contributor to bottlenecks. He presented Continuous testing as a strategy to optimize this process by carefully positioning tests as early as possible in the value stream. He said, “Unless testing activities are optimized for speed, the distribution of them is not enough to significantly accelerate overall software delivery lead times. The key is to accelerate the time taken to get test verdicts.”

What’s Next?

There are many events, webinars, and in-person opportunities. Stay up to date DevOps Institute event calendar: https://www.devopsinstitute.com/events/

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