CONTINUOUS DELIVERY
Short Cycles
Continuous Delivery is a software development approach in which teams develop, create, test, and deploy software in short cycles. Due to the high degree of automation, the software may be delivered tested during each sprint – and if necessary – many times per sprint.
Risk mitigation
With Continuous Delivery, your software will be continuously built, tested, and deployed to systems at a very early stage.
This lowers the risks and costs of deploying software additions and changes by allowing for incremental updates for live applications.
„Shift left“
Shift left describes the approach of docking build and test activities as close as possible to the development process and testing them continuously. „Shift left“ because this replaces rigid and monolithic testing plans with highly automated, agile and incremental testing („we test every 6 months on our staging environment“). This avoids the chance of errors being discovered late and causing a lot of cost & effort to be fixed.
Fewer integration risks
The main goal of Continuous Integration (CI) is to avoid integration problems of different artifacts with each other and with the existing production environment. As a result, integration tests are performed following automated testing of individual components to detect potential problems in the interaction of different software components at an early stage.
Methodology
Not every problem can be solved with tools. Methodologies such as „Test Driven Development“ can provide a stronger focus on the testability of software. Rather than merely relying on the tools we work with your development teams to devise a suitable strategy to give the teams more responsibility and autonomy while improving software quality.
Tools
„A fool with a tool is still a fool“. However, several tools are beneficial and necessary for automated software deployment and testing. We bring hands-on expertise with the most popular tools and work with you to determine which are best suited for your needs.
Testability of requirements
Whether automated or not, tests are used to map the acceptance criteria of user stories. Naturally, this means that measurable and testable acceptance criteria must first be defined. If this is not the case, our expert coaches and requirement engineers will help your product owners formulate functional and non-functional acceptance criteria as a basis for all test projects.
High degree of automation
To ensure that software quality keeps pace with agile development, we recommend that our customers automate their testing activities as much as possible. This allows for frequent test repetition and closes the gap between test execution and development iteration. In addition, the reproducibility of found errors increases dramatically due to the always repeatable test scenarios.
Fast results
Agile testing produces quick results and significantly simplifies troubleshooting. Furthermore, the possibility of delayed operational failures and the long-term deterioration of software quality due to cumulative bugs is considerably reduced. We also use our tools to uncover software quality concerns by identifying gaps in test coverage.
Test analysis & monitoring
In addition to the technical implementation of the test measures, an agile test procedure naturally compromises a sensible test strategy, automated test data management that provides data in a replicable and automated manner, and good analysis options for any anomalies found.
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The Scrum team refines and estimates the most important user stories as determined by the product owner.
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The development team works on the user stories for the current sprint and performs daily stand-ups.
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Unit tests are part of the „Definition of Done“ and test the developed methods and interfaces.
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Automated regression tests continuously ensure that new code does not disrupt existing functionality.
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Automated performance & capacity tests provide continuous information on the quality of the current increment.
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The development team presents the sprint results to the product owner and receives feedback right away.
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The developed and continuously automated tested artifacts are ready for deployment or are automatically deployed to the target system.
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Bugs are found during the current sprint and fixed directly. This leads to an early and continuous improvement of the software quality.
Your contact for this topic
Stephan Rossbach
Agile Coach | Scrum Master | Agile Test Manager
