Testing in Production means to perform testing activities in a production state or live environment which is accessible by the end user. As companies move to implement Agile, DevOps or Continuous Integration and Delivery, testing in production tends to become an integral part of the process.

Selenium is an open-source solution for ‘automating’ web application testing. Self-made automation frameworks such as Selenium are fundamentally about testing the low-level code, not the user experience,

Validata Group extends its leading Digital Automation platform to support DevOps for Temenos Core Banking, with risk-based impact analysis and Continuous Testing, focusing on exposing user interface software and user experience issues early in the lifecycle.

Model-based testing can be considered as the natural evolution of software testing, addressing the challenges of current software testing market and distinguishing itself away from traditional testing methods. Traditional approaches have achieved little in terms of automation, keeping automation levels below 25% even after 30 years of software testing.

Agile and DevOps practices have brought a revolutionary wave in testing. The shift-left way of thinking has made testing and development no longer separate tasks and gave to testing the ability to track the quality metrics right from the inception and on a regular basis thanks to a more ‘continuous’ approach (Continuous Testing, Continuous Development and Continuous Deployment).

by Vaios Vaitsis, Founder & CEO at Validata Group   To win, serve and retain customers, testing activities are becoming more pivotal as business process quality is deemed more important than time to market. Beginning with the business-driven change request, through to project scoping and on to DevOps adoption, the infrastructure for technical and regression testing must be present and aligned to every phase.

It is a fact that test automation shortens development cycles, avoids cumbersome repetitive tasks and create repeatable, reusable test scenarios that can be executed as often as needed to improve software quality. The first step is to identify the right test automation tool that fits your overall requirements from a variety of options available in the market, both commercial and open source.

The shift towards Agile and Continuous Delivery requires higher levels of test automation, with the main challenge being the creation and maintenance of test environments.

A big discrepancy between test and production environments can be another factor that causes problem to test automation cycles. In most cases, the end-users probably use a different resolution, browser version, or an operating system version than the one you’ve run the tests against, resulting in environments being the weakest link in the process.

Wouldn’t be amazing if you could test in real world a newly developed software BEFORE it rolls out to the market? Actually, User Acceptance Testing (also known as UAT, Beta, Application, or End-User Testing) can do this. It is the last quality check  ‘gate’ that validates  the solution before it reaches the end user, but what if you could do this validation before “manual “ UAT and in an automated manner?

Enjoy our top 7 most popular articles of 2016: