Test data management (TDM) is a critical activity in the testing lifecycle. And this is undergoing continuous refinement with constant changes in the technology landscape and application development process.

Contents 1. Effective Test Data Management Strategy 2. Big Data 3. Service Virtualization 4. DevOps Practices 5. Agile Methodology 6. Conclusion

TDM is highly critical in the testing lifecycle, as the quantum of data generated while testing is massive. Automating the test data helps in minimizing the time spent on processing the data, generating reports faster. However, some key trends have been empowering the TDM strategy. These key trends must be considered while creating an effective test data strategy to reduce time-to-market and improve efficiency. Let’s discuss these trends.

Effective Test Data Management Strategy

Big Data

Big data is a growing technology-driven program, and its strategic significance is growing gradually. With the rapid increase in the adoption of big data, test data architects need continuous data privacy and security solutions. Due to rising breach cases, IT organizations need to expand their data privacy and regulatory compliance initiative by including development and testing environments into the scope. In the current scenario, testing a big data application has become a challenge due to lack of proven test frameworks and toolsets. To set this right, test architects must manage test data and regulatory compliance in their test data strategy.

Service Virtualization

In the world of agile and DevOps, testing the applications need accurate, reliable, and comprehensive test environments. While this can be challenging, testers must execute integration tests on the application with various code versions and test data combinations. Therefore, test data architects need solutions to virtualize application behavior with predefined test data combination. Various organizations are leveraging service virtualization with proper test data configuration as a technique to minimalize costs in the non-production environment.

DevOps Practices

The implementation of DevOps practice promotes collaboration across teams involved in the software development lifecycle. The product, as well as test managers, deliver software in quick cycles and of high quality by continuous integration. A test data architect should leverage database virtualization in TDM for faster provisioning of non-production forms of databases virtually.

Agile Methodology

Agile delivery methods necessitate delivery within shorter delivery cycles with high quality. In every agile sprint, the test teams build, run, and automate tests for which the test data management teams execute data refresh and provide the test data needed to perform the tests. The ideal situation for a test data architect is to ensure optimal data sets with maximum test coverage. This solution helps in completing the testing on time.

Conclusion

Concisely, Test Data Management architects and consultants must be aware of the impact of these major trends on their existing test data strategy. Equipped with this information, they must modify their test data strategy with effective solutions, such as service virtualization, to integrate an ultramodern vision into their Test Data Management strategy. Test data is often generated using existing data. Therefore, the data must be kept confidential to protect the individual’s interest or business interests. Securing the test data is important based on the criticality of the application under test.

At TestingXperts, we have employed robust test data management practices for intricate enterprise platforms. Connect with our experts to improve test effectiveness by using accurate test data and institutionalizing the entire test data management process.

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Businesses nowadays have not just exposed most of their internal applications to the customer, but have also developed additional software that outspreads and complements those applications. Software failures have severe business consequences, which is why application-related risks have become evident constituents of a business’ public financial filing. As a result, enterprises are embracing comprehensive software testing techniques for their applications.

Contents 1. How Did 2023 Embrace Change? 2. Faster Release Cycles Will Require DevOps and Continuous Testing 3. IoT and Cross-platform Engagement Will Require More Devices and More Applications 4. Conclusion

How Did 2023 Embrace Change?

In 2023, we saw remarkable growth in adoption of agile methodologies such as ATDD and BDD. Besides this, organizations have left legacy tools behind, supporting faster and agile-ready testing. This move emulates the need to cater to every role that touches continuous testing such as development, testing, or operations.

In 2023, organizations will witness the above-stated solutions growing to a higher scale, whereby the manual and legacy tools skills will transform into more modern ones. The evolution of continuous testing (CT), continuous integration (CI), and DevOps will also transform into much shorter releases acting as a channel towards real continuous delivery (CD). Leading organizations will be forced to invest in people and empower their developers with continuous testing capabilities that reflect a better range of quality checks, i.e. focusing more on DevSecOps. QA will no longer be a bottleneck, rather it will become the crux of the entire CI/CD cycle. The year 2023 will also bring a clear focus on Test Data Management as businesses will continue to find the accessibility of test data to be one of the most crucial aspects that drives lead time in test cycles.

Faster Release Cycles Will Require DevOps and Continuous Testing

DevOps is meant to trace an entire organization; though it’s profoundly weighted in the software development lifecycle. This is the reason that DevOps will be going mainstream in 2023. Companies will be making the adoption of DevOps practices a top priority. The main objective of companies will be delivering value to the customers faster through the automation of the release processes. This will only happen if the organizations realize that in order to establish their DevOps processes, they would require continuous testing as a part of their continuous integration process. In order to achieve faster and timely release cycles, companies will have to migrate away from the legacy testing solutions that inhibit them from shift left methodologies by leveraging cloud-based and open-source testing solutions.

IoT and Cross-platform Engagement Will Require More Devices and More Applications

With organizations’ ever-changing processes and innovations to mix different digital technologies, there will be an evident rise in the IoT (Internet of Things) devices. This transformation will create a need for more applications, further insisting on continuous testing of those applications.

In this year, industries such as healthcare, financial services, e-commerce, and automotive will all completely embrace the IoT. There might be transformations in the current processes and applications, as consumers and developers embrace the continuously evolving innovative capabilities coming in 2023.

Conclusion

To maintain and nurture customers and productivity, CIOs must identify the significance of empowering developers with the right tools and time to implement continuous testing across the SDLC. Tools that are powered by automation and the cloud solutions are increasing competency, reducing the time that is spent by developers on manual quality-checking. It also helps to produce apps that are synchronized with customer expectations.

The value of an efficient, or not-so efficient DevOps process can effectively ‘make or break’ an organization. In this year, organizations should include IT leadership in these conversations to make sure that developers are getting what they require, when they require it, in order to keep businesses moving as anticipated. TestingXperts specializes in market-leading devops software testing tools for enterprises. TestingXperts has constantly been growing with the transformational changes in the industry and is equipped to take on forthcoming changes effectively this year.

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Software testing industry has witnessed a tremendous evolution in the last few years. The methodologies and practices of software testing are on a continuous transformation. With the incessant need for QA, software testing industry is coming up with more intellectual trends in the coming year. In this infographic, we will discuss the emerging software testing trends that will rule 2018.

Software Testing Trends 2018

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Agile methodology has transformed the software industry completely. Every organization is adopting agile in various forms and shapes to align with their business needs and to achieve their ultimate goal of being accessible to the market needs and end users. Therefore, agile methodologies are being executed in several ways. These days, agile methodology is perceived as a quick, responsive, and a flexible software development method. As a result, many companies have customized Agile Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) to suit their needs.

Contents 1. Agile Methodology: Effective Transformation in Testing 2. Benefits of Agile Methodology 3. Conclusion

Agile methodology: Effective Transformation in Testing

However, with the passage of time, and the changing user requirements, testing became an important and the most significant aspect of the agile methodology. All these years, testing teams have been contributing to the agile methodology and have evolved immensely.

Here is the list of progressions made by the testing team from several perspectives:

Benefits of Agile Methodology

1. Great collaboration and complete involvement with the whole team: By shifting left in the development lifecycle give a chance to the testers to collaborate with the rest of the product team rather than just being an isolated entity that enters the phase just before the release. This value addition by the testers has revealed the evolution of their work and how they have become a great help to the other teams by collaborating with them.

2. Better-quality work with the best methods: The focus on test automation has helped testers in giving up repetitive tasks from their plates which were earlier done manually. This has given testers more time to analyze and perform better and bigger things such as competitive analysis; business needs accomplishments, end-user feedback analysis, etc.

3. Recognition for the work they do: Testing teams have their own accountability and have a better reputation than ever before. Nowadays, testers are involved in the project right from its production planning and designing stages, the development teams and the testers work together to bring out a better deliverable in lesser time. This level of contribution polish their skills and bring out their best in consideration that they were earlier not a part of.

4. Stronger connection with end users: With the understanding that in an Agile program, the product team as a whole is more accessible and involved with end users, testers as end-user representatives on the team have enormous potential to the front-end with users, be it usability studies, beta programs or product demos, etc. Currently, testers have a better understanding of the product from an end-user viewpoint which helps them get better in their own roles.

Finally and most importantly, agile has helped the testers to build quality with speed and contribute to the project in their own way.

TestingXperts with its expertise and extensive experience in agile methodology has been able to deliver high-quality projects within a shorter duration. Our software testing experts employ industry best agile and DevOps practices, in-house developed intelligent frameworks and processes that enhance the client’s processes to enhance process predictability and performance in the long run.

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The world is becoming more interconnected and intelligent with each passing day. CIOs are motivated by moving from waterfall projects to continuous delivery of working software. To facilitate continuous delivery, DevOps has become a priority.

Fundamentals for a Successful DevOps Implementation

DevOps is a methodology and a culture shift that emphasizes collaboration across the entire lifecycle of a product. In this infographic, we will discuss the four fundamentals that are important for a successful DevOps implementation.

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Today’s fast-paced technology-centric world presents opportunities and threats at every turn. It has become challenging to practice agile development no matter how big or small an organization you are. To become sustainable in this disruptive environment, agility is key.

Contents 1. How to bring Agility into your organization and how to survive? 2. Conclusion

Let us have a look at the 6 most effective ways an organization can achieve business agility.

How to bring Agility into your organization and how to survive?

1. Scalability To deliver customer satisfaction, there is a need for a reliable value-delivery engine aligned with top business priorities, giving you fast and predictable implementation across the entire software development lifecycle. Waterfall teams are unable to deliver faster, as required by the enterprises these days.

2. Performance Bringing agility into your organization means sensing and adapting to change rapidly and confidently. Building responsiveness into your organization’s DNA is important, in order to take a disciplined approach to managing change, for which business agility is critical. Delivery is the origin for bringing agility. Improving cycle time can significantly affect your end result. Agility helps in fulfilling customer requirements early and often, assuring that you are building the right products.

3. Adaptive Planning Funding and scope are two key factors that can allow your business to move and build responsiveness. Establishing a consistent planning speed can help enterprises decrease risk and increase investor confidence.

4. Growth It is observed that most enterprises spend approximately 15% of their budget on innovation. However, highly effective organizations allocate at least 50% of their budget on growth initiatives. By increasing speed, productivity and quality, you can spend fewer resources on fixing bugs, technical debt and refactoring. Agility helps in making the right decisions with confidence.

5. Bring Change In order to nurture growth and innovation, it is important to follow a deliberate approach to investments in innovation. Business agility helps in connecting horizon investments and disciplined exploration with the principle of fail fast and fail cheap.

6. Organize around Customer Value It is important to connect with the market, customers and stakeholders. For this, breaking down functional silos is important, as it helps in improving collaboration, minimizing dependencies and reducing waste. It helps in allowing you to respond to opportunities and threats rapidly and confidently.

Scaling helps in organizing around customer value at the delivery level by creating teams that are aligned with common release objectives. Scaling also helps in ensuring the business to identify the true value of your agile developments.

Conclusion

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The last few years have witnessed an insistent acceptance of new method named ‘Containers’ as organizations wish to deal with disruption at a faster pace. Containers have been around in the IT world for over a decade now, but the arrival of Docker made them more popular as it re-invented containers by adding a robust platform, integrated management tools, and code registry.

Contents 1. What are ‘Containers’ and why do we need them? 2. Containers and DevOps: What’s the connection? 3. Conclusion

What are ‘Containers’ and why do we need them?

Containers are the answer to the common problems faced by software to run consistently while moving from one computing environment to the other. This could be from a developer’s system to a test environment, or from a physical machine in the data center into a virtual machine in the cloud. Containers have become an integral part of the application development space, particularly in cloud computing. This is mainly because portability has been the biggest hitch in this space and given the proprietary nature of these public clouds, this method helps in abstracting applications into a virtual container that can be moved from one cloud to another.

The architecture of containers is an added advantage as it contains a standard method to divide applications into dispersed objects or also known as containers. This flexible approach offers more advantages around workload management and also offers the ability to make defect-tolerant systems. Containerizing the application platform can help in abstracting away the differences in the OS distribution. Another great benefit of containers is ‘modularity’ i.e., rather than running an entire application inside the container; the application can be split into different modules.

Containers and DevOps: What’s the connection?

You might have heard ‘DevOps’ and ‘Containers’ in the same sentence quite often Though, they are different concepts, but the effectiveness of containers makes it easier to enable DevOps workflows. Though DevOps is not tied to any particular technology; it can be implemented through any tool, it is convenient to implement DevOps with the help of containers.

-Containers have become an easy solution for the DevOps teams as it makes collaborating with various teams such as development, testing, and operation easier and convenient.

-Containers are able to support multiple frameworks, and it becomes easier to switch between different programming frameworks in DevOps.

-Rolling out application updates on a streamlined basis is required for a continuous delivery of software. When the application is distributed into multiple microservices, each one hosted in a separate container, you are able to update one part of the application by restarting the container without barging in the rest of the app.

While both containers and DevOps are helping improve software quality, the focus on automation and continuous delivery have been leading to various quality issues. Developers are often challenged with log files that are scattered in a variety of isolated containers each with its own log system dependencies. Continuous testing should be implemented to allow development teams to detect problems early on. If a continuous testing approach is not followed, fixing of errors will take much longer. TestingXperts’ intelligent continuous testing platform Tx-Automate has been enabling end-to-end automation of applications to enhance the quality of the software and increase speed to market. Connect with our Test Advisorsy services and allow us to help you build a defect-free and quality software/ application.

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DevOps has become a popular methodology of collaboration in today’s technological world. DevOps is the combination of development, operations, and QA, promoting clear communication and collaboration between individuals and teams. The differences between the developers and the operations teams are well known to all.

However, with the advent of DevOps, the battle lines have been erased to a certain extent. DevOps has been moving rapidly from being a concept to reality and enhancing the business impact, speed, and quality of the application delivery. Many organizations are shifting to DevOps to reach the continuous delivery stage and to achieve agility with efficiency.

What are the tools required for DevOps?

In this infographic, we will discuss the ideal set of tools to help you with your DevOps journey.

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The infotainment and the entertainment industry has experienced extraordinary changes over the past. Television, which was considered to be an ‘idiot box’ has now been replaced by smart televisions having numerous prodigious features.

Contents

With the arrival of online channels, the entertainment industry has been progressively reintroducing itself by providing features such as a movie on demand. These days, you do not have to wait for a movie to come on TV, you can place an order, and the movie will be available to you in seconds. Likewise, the LIVE streaming of a cricket match on your smart device has become a new-age innovation. You carry the world in your smart device!

Role of Continuous Testing

These digital innovations require a seamless experience. However, do we know the real reason behind these digital innovations, and how to deliver a seamless experience every time? Pioneering software testing approaches such as DevOps, Agile, and Shift-Right have been ruling the software development cycle and forming a great impact. The intense emphasis on continuous testing and continuous delivery has made organizations move towards it, to deliver software that accurately reflects the end-user need.

In this challenging and changing phase, it is important for every enterprise to showcase quality in their offerings and deliver vigorous applications. This indicates that the key to effective delivery is performance, which comes with continuous software testing. Testing has become an end-to-end, cross-functional operation, collaboratively involving all teams throughout the product lifecycle. Continuous testing applies methods and concepts of agile development to the testing and QA process, resulting in greater efficiency.

Continuous Testing Objectives:

• Flawless delivery

• Faster time to market

• Assured efficiency

• A holistic view of the application quality

While there are several testing tools available in the market, it is imperative to understand the relevance of these tools for your business. Continuous testing is a process where automation is the critical factor – establishing an  end-to-end automation testing solution that’s integrated with existing continuous integration and continuous delivery processes.

Continuous Testing Ensuring Continuous Quality

Continuous testing helps ensure that quality is built in from the requirements while validating each component at the development level before it enters the system. Meanwhile, iterative QA starts from day one. Defects and uncertainty of changing user needs can be resolved as they emerge, avoiding late rework and damage to the ultimate user experience. Design, test, and development assets are all built on users’ desired functionality and are maintained consistently as this changes. Meanwhile, the software is accurately deployed, resulting in better-quality software delivered earlier and at less cost.

How TestingXperts can help you achieve continuous quality

DevOps is an integral part of delivering efficient software. To reach the continuous delivery stage with continuous quality, enterprises need to do more than just adopt some DevOps tools. Enterprises need to reinvent their old school practices supporting traditional methodologies.

TestingXperts, as a frontrunner in adopting agile methodologies and DevOps practices, can help you automate your tests, achieve timely delivery schedules, and strengthen your agile process. Know more about our Agile and DevOps methodologies and allow us to help you deliver your software applications faster and better.

Read more blogs on Continuous Testing:

1. Continuous Testing: Missing Link for Continuous Delivery 2. Enable Continuous Testing with Shift Left and Shift Right Approach
3. 4 Best Practices of Continuous Testing You Must know

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An organization may adopt modern and competent processes and tools, but they cannot fetch any value without the willingness of people to acclimatize themselves to execute these processes and usage of tools. The limitations of tester and developer roles become indistinct in Agile and DevOps methodologies. These days a tester might have to configure deployments, and a developer might require configuring the automation test cases, and add them to the QA repository.

Contents 1. Continuous Testing Role in DevOps 2. Continuous Testing Best Practices 3. Conclusion

Continuous Testing Role in DevOps

Delivering large scale application suites can be extremely challenging. The extreme pressure of testing complex systems and meeting the demands of time-to-market make it increasingly difficult to deliver reliable systems in time.

The only potential way to meet these challenging demands of today’s business environment is to start testing from the beginning of software development lifecycle. This continuous approach to testing includes testing requirements and system designs to be testable through automated techniques. Continuous testing also plays a major role in continuous delivery. It involves the usage of concepts and methods of Agile development for the QA and testing process, proposing more efficient testing process. Executing automated end-to-end testing as part of the software development continuously throughout the SDLC is termed as continuous testing.

Given below are a set of best practices that can help in implementing and improving testing throughout the software development lifecycle.

Continuous Testing Best Practices

1. Collaborate With Business

Continuous Testing means testing early and frequently. We must ensure to acquire requirements from business to start development.• Building a close relationship with the business analysts is important for QA

• Eliminating vagueness from user stories is important- one must ensure user story includes a clear set of acceptance criteria and is testable

• Ignoring non-functional testing can be risky as it can hamper security and performance

• Building meaningful and important end-to-end test scenarios by utilizing data/analytics and trends from the production website to collect information about user journeys and activities through the application should be significant

2. Lean Testing

Continuous testing requires completely focusing on providing value for business. Instead of spending effort and time on producing artifacts that do not provide value, the focus should be on organizing testing in a lean manner.

• Pairing testers with developers is important to ensure effective unit testing is executed

• Reducing unnecessary testing artifacts like carrying out extensive test cases and test plans, reducing wait times for testing should be kept in mind

• Adapting a more investigative attitude towards testing while testing manually can be helpful

3. Implement a QA Practice

• Building a strong QA and testing practice that drives development and defining an agile QA testing strategy can prove to be useful

• Running regular QA workshops where the testers can improve their soft skills as well as technical skills is significant

• Leveraging technical architecture diagrams, models of the applications, and implementing accurate test techniques are beneficial

4. Automated Testing

Continuous testing follows the test early and test often approach. Automated testing is useful in order to get quick feedback on the application quality.

• Making test automation a responsibility of both developers and testers is imperative

• Knowing when to automate tests and when to leave them as manual is critical for an effective and speedy delivery

• Running automated tests from a CI server is significant

• Automating new functionality and stories along development instead of leaving them for later should be the ultimate goal.

Conclusion

Continuous testing has proved to be a major asset to organizations who are looking to accelerate their software development and release schedules. TestingXperts, as an early adopter of DevOps and agile practices, helps fulfill delivery schedules in time and boost software development process. Know more about our Agile and DevOps methodologies and allow us to help you deliver your software applications faster and better.

1. Continuous Testing: Missing Link for Continuous Delivery

2. Enable Continuous Testing with Shift Left and Shift Right Approach

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