Is Continuous Testing “Built in Quality”​

The Testing Manifesto entails that every member in a team is responsible for the quality in the end product and regardless of whether or not the agile team has dedicated testers. The test manifesto succinctly is put in the following paradigm and applies to Agile teams weather co-located or distributed.

Testing Manifesto in short is

1. Testing throughout
2. Prevent the bugs
3. Understand the System as a whole
4. Build the system rather breaking
5. Team Responsibility over testers

Continuous testing uses this paradigm by enabling testing at the onset or beginning of development process and keep the validation phase throughout the development life cycle. This helps to provide the development teams with continuous feedback at various stages and prevents bugs creeping late in the development cycle.

Testing throughout is achieved with automated unit tests during the development cycle.Its every developer responsibility to own and create unit test with a suite that could be run at anytime, ie during a bug fix or before a build or during Service Pack or Quick Fix. It creates confidence that the code is unbroken and good to ship

Preventing the bugs is shifting left , focusing on maintaining and building the quality within the system. Thinking about the system from the end state helps, the team should comprehend ways and means to monitor quality at every stage and ensure the leakages to the next phase is minimal.

Understanding the system as a whole is another paradigm for the teams to manage issues that may arise into production. Each member of the team should think of means or ways to provide feedback ie tools or process that helps to discover how system will behave in production. This rquires understanding what team is building and take ownership.

Building the system is opposite to breaking the system. The team mindset should change with a build mechanism for ‘build in quality’ from the outset with continuous integration, build automation suite that can be run daily, build monitors/probes for production like appdynamics.

Team responsibility ie everyone in the team is responsibility for the build in quality for the production/solution that is being build, The testers are only an entity but the team takes the ownership

Summary: By implementing continuous testing, the team is responsible for the build in quality but not only the testers. The tester feedback in the cycle is to refine and improve the product and automate ( if they have skill) but at the end its the team ownership for building and shipping a product/solution with shared ownership.