Regression Testing and Continuous Integration

Regression Testing

One of the core tenants on Continuous Testing states that quality should evolve beyond its traditional place near the end of the development cycle, and that it instead should act as a gatekeeper between each stage of the pipeline. This means that testing is occurring earlier and more frequently – often before the first line of code is ever written.

One example of how Continuous Testing has changed the way developers view quality is the idea of regression testing. A form of functional testing, regression tests were traditionally performed in production to ensure that newly released features and updates didn’t compromise any existing functionality. While this is still very important, there are other places where regression testing can be useful. For example, regression testing can help ensure that units of code don’t break the build when merged into the larger trunks. Wherever you need validation when one component is merged with another, regression tests can help ensure that everything works as expected.

Regardless of how or where you use regression tests, it is crucial that you have access to the infrastructure that can support this, and the other types of testing you may be doing throughout your pipeline. The Sauce Labs Continuous Testing Cloud provides the most comprehensive cloud-based platform for teams who want to deliver better quality apps faster. With our broad support for browsers, emulators and simulators, and real mobile devices, along with the ability to scale tests in massive parallelization, we offer the flexibility to configure your environment to meet all of the different types of tests you need to support.

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Continuous Integration

Continuous Integration (or CI) is a software development practice to help teams ship higher quality software, faster. By bringing traditionally difficult, late-hitting events as early into the process as possible and automating processes that had been manual, CI removes many bottlenecks that often slow down development efforts while reducing the risk of major technical issues hitting late in the release cycle.

The center of CI revolves around a server, or a tool that orchestrates tasks that the development team defines. The most popular CI servers are Jenkins, Bamboo, Team City, and others. From these tools, there are a host of plugins that can help support increased development velocity. However, one thing that many teams overlook when implementing CI practices is testing, and more specifically automated testing.

Automating your development processes without automating any of your testing significantly prohibits your team from seeing the true benefits of CI. Organizations that implement a sound test automation strategy in conjunction with CI avoid the common pitfall of testing becoming a bottleneck, and are easily able to scale their efforts.

Sauce Labs has over 10 years of experience in automated testing at scale. With our integrations to all of the most popular CI servers, we offer on demand cloud-based infrastructure that allows you to achieve the development velocity that you need to keep innovating your apps.

To learn more about the importance of automated testing in Continuous Integration, take a look at this CI white paper.