For so long, software development has been like throwing code over a wall and hoping someone catches it. The "throw it over the wall" approach with developers on one side writing code, and QA on the other testing, often led to delays and frustration as bugs were discovered late in the process, making them time-consuming and expensive to fix. A better approach is long overdue.
Modern methodologies like Agile and DevOps promote collaboration. Agile methodologies like Scrum and Kanban are based on short sprints, continuous feedback, and collaboration among all stakeholders including developers and QA testers.
Continuous integration, a core principle of agile methodology, means that testing is no longer an afterthought or a final hurdle - it's proactively built into your development workflow through healthy collaboration. Shift-left testing, the tech buzzword of the day (whether you love it or hate it), encourages developers to write unit tests (tests for individual code units) and integration tests (tests for how different code modules work together) as they code. This proactive approach allows them to spot bugs early, when they're easier and cheaper to fix. A Capgemini study revealed that a staggering 70% of defects are discovered during testing, stressing the value of earlier developer involvement.
[Industry experts underscore the benefits of this integrated approach. Lisa Crispin, a leading agile testing expert, emphasizes the importance of breaking down silos between developers and testers: "In the agile world, testers and developers work together as a team with a shared goal: delivering high-quality software that meets the needs of the business." Jez Humble, co-author of the DevOps Handbook, highlights the synergy: "Developers who understand testing can write better code, and testers who understand development can write better tests." Developers are now more often involved in testing other than unit and integration tests, such as API, security, and performance testing, which we will cover in more detail in this post.]
Categories of software testing
Developers are increasingly taking an active role in software testing, and for good reason. Early involvement in the testing process provides early bug detection, improved code quality and reliability, faster iteration and feedback loops, and more frequent releases.
At a high level, you can divide software types into three main categories:
Tests that assess technical application quality
Performance and usability testing
Security testing
Essential tests for developers to know
Functional testing
Unit testing ensures your code works, but functional testing takes it a step further. It focuses on the user experience, ensuring a smooth and bug-free journey. It catches usability issues and integration problems early in the development process. For example, a user might struggle to log in due to a typo in the URL configurations connecting the front-end and back-end. This issue could be missed by unit tests but caught by comprehensive functional testing.
Functional testing ensures that an application works as intended according to the specified user requirements. It involves testing the application with valid and invalid input to verify the expected output.
Mastering functional testing empowers you as a developer to build better applications more efficiently, with a clear focus on the end user. By simulating how users interact with the code, developers can identify and fix issues early. As an agile developer, you should execute exploratory and automated functional testing on new features to catch bugs early. Tools like Selenium and Cypress enable you to write automated functional tests across browsers and devices.
Unit testing
As a developer, you strive to write clean, reliable code. Unit testing is your secret weapon in this quest. It involves meticulously checking individual code blocks such as functions, modules, and classes, to ensure they function flawlessly.
Why are unit tests so crucial? Well, they ensure that every line of code gets covered, leaving no stone unturned in the quest for comprehensive code coverage. Unit tests detect issues early, improve code reliability, and give developers more confidence when refactoring code.
Mastering unit testing empowers you as a developer to take ownership of code quality from the start. Frameworks like Jest, JUnit, xUnit, MSTest, and pytest simplify writing unit tests. Sauce Labs offers frameworks and utilities to simplify unit testing across languages and frameworks.
Integration testing
Integration testing is the assessment of how multiple units or modules of code function as a group. The primary purpose of unit testing is to ensure that newly developed code units can integrate effectively into an existing codebase without introducing compatibility or dependency issues.
As such, integration testing is another type of test that usually happens quite early in the software development life cycle – usually right after unit testing is complete. Integration tests can also be automated in most cases. Some test automation frameworks that support unit testing, such as Jest, also enable integration tests. In addition, so-called end-to-end testing frameworks, which are designed to support a broad set of testing types, also usually facilitate integration tests. Selenium is an example of this type of framework.
Performance testing
As a developer, it is not enough to code and release software products, you have to care about their stability. At any point in the SDLC, you need to ask yourself a couple of questions: Does your app render quickly and flawlessly every time on every device and operating system? Are your page transitions fast and smooth? Are your users satisfied with the pace of their transactions on your site? Can it handle an increase in user traffic? That is the essence of performance testing.
Performance testing measures how an application handles load, stress, and volume. It evaluates an application’s responsiveness, speed, and stability under various conditions. As a developer, you need to master how to implement performance tests to identify bottlenecks and ensure optimal performance under peak loads. Services like Sauce Labs allow you to execute automated performance tests at scale across geographic locations.
Accessibility testing
Accessibility testing is a type of testing that ensures that an application works well for different types of users, including those who face challenges that don't apply to a majority of users. For example, accessibility tests can validate whether an application performs well for users with hearing or visual impairments.
Accessibility tests can be performed using a combination of automated and manual testing techniques. Some accessibility features, such as tools within an app that allow users to increase the size of fonts, can be assessed automatically, but collecting manual feedback from users with particular accessibility needs helps provide additional context and detect accessibility issues that automated tests may overlook.
Visual/UI testing
Visual/UI testing is a testing method designed to detect issues related to the appearance and layout of an application. For example, if an image inside a Web application appears in a distorted fashion on devices with small screens, visual/UI tests should surface the issue.
Thus, it's important to understand that visual/UI tests don't typically collect feedback from actual users on whether they like an application's visual interface. This is instead a type of automated test that validates whether the application UI renders in the way developers intended. Determining whether users actually like the UI or not is a separate issue (which brings us to usability testing, discussed below).
Visual regression testing
As a developer, you are constantly making code updates that may affect the user interface (UI) of the software you are building. Code updates may bring about UI and visual bugs in the software that end up affecting the usability of applications and websites. This is why visual regression testing, part of visual testing, is crucial for developers to master. It ensures that any updates to the system, software, or code do not impact the product's user interface or usability.
User interface (UI) and visual bugs in software products are often disregarded due to the focus on functional testing. Visual regression testing works in such a way that every time a code change occurs, it looks for any unexpected visual changes or visual “regression” defects by taking snapshots of the user interface and comparing them from one commit instance to another. For example, Sauce Labs Visual Testing (formerly Screener.io) can be integrated into your pipeline for continuous integration to automate visual testing by continuously recording and running tests in the cloud. Sauce Labs Visual employs screenshots and DOM snapshots to detect visual bugs on app pages and ensure a platform-independent UI. Read on and learn how to implement visual testing using Sauce Labs.
End-to-end testing
End-to-end testing is a term that refers to all of the types of software tests that teams would normally perform during the software development life cycle. It's not a specific type of test as much as it's a catch-all phrase that encompasses all of the testing requirements of modern applications.
The goal of end-to-end testing is to ensure that all aspects of an application meet all requirements to which they are subject. If you perform each type of software test described above, you're performing end-to-end testing.
Security Testing
We are already experiencing too many cybersecurity software breaches in various sectors for developers not to care about security testing. It is your responsibility as a developer to ensure that your software solution addresses known security vulnerabilities because, after all, your software’s security is only as good as your last test.
Security testing detects vulnerabilities that could compromise an application. Security testing methods such as penetration testing, vulnerability scanning, and fuzzing help detect weaknesses in applications that could be exploited. Developers should conduct regular security testing, especially for applications handling sensitive data. Open-source tools like OWASP ZAP and commercial services offer support for automated security testing. Additionally, Sauce Labs integrates with leading security testing tools to help developers remediate issues and build more robust software.
There are other multiple types of security tests, such as:
Software Composition Analysis (SCA), which assesses applications for insecure dependencies or components.
Static Application Security Testing (SAST), which scans source code for problems like injection vulnerabilities.
Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST), which simulates malicious interactions with running applications to detect potential vulnerabilities.
Because each type of security test reveals different types of risks, teams typically perform multiple types of security testing.
Additional testing practices for developers
As developers take a more active role in testing, several additional best practices such as code reviews, static code analysis, and automated testing should be incorporated into the development workflow. These practices complement the essential tests discussed previously and further help to catch issues early, improve code quality, and streamline the development process.
Code Reviews
Code reviews are a collaborative process where developers examine each other’s code to identify potential bugs, performance issues, adherence to best practices, security vulnerabilities, and opportunities for improvement before the code is merged into the main branch. It's important for developers to regularly review each other's code and give constructive feedback. This helps in creating high-quality software that's easy to maintain and also helps in sharing knowledge among team members. Code reviews play a crucial role in the software development process, making sure that developers work together and maintain the integrity of the code. This results in robust, reliable, and efficient software being released.
Static Code Analysis
SonarQube, PMD, and Bandit are static code analysis tools that help developers spot errors in their source code without running it. These tools identify style violations, performance errors, or vulnerabilities, assisting developers in dealing with such issues at the early stages of development. Static code analysis improves and secures developers' code while facilitating development, making applications or software more reliable and maintainable.
Automated Testing: Continuous Integration Continuous Deployment(CD/CD)
Manual testing is tiresome. As a developer, speed is your superpower, and test automation is critical. This is why CI/CD should be your greatest friend, as it automates testing processes and ensures thorough testing for each code update. Leveraging CI/CD tools such as Jenkins, Travis CI, and GitLab CI helps to speed the process, whereas Sauce Labs supports comprehensive testing across several environments and browsers. This test automation detects errors earlier, speeds product releases, and reduces regression risks. Embracing CI/CD and employing these test automation tools allows developers to streamline workflows, focus on high-quality code, and deliver software rapidly and consistently.
Testing in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)
You can perform most types of software tests on an ad hoc basis, or via processes that are not linked to other aspects of software development. But in most cases, software testing is faster and more efficient when it is integrated into the software development life cycle (SDLC) such that tests happen routinely and (to the extent possible) automatically.
For example, running unit tests as part of the SDLC means that whenever developers write a new unit of code, a unit testing routine automatically begins. Likewise, performance testing as part of the SDLC would mean that as soon as a new application release candidate is compiled and deployed into a testing environment, automated performance tests occur.
Manual vs. Automated Testing
As noted above, most types of software tests can be performed automatically using frameworks that let engineers define what they want to test using code, then execute tests automatically.
In most cases, automated testing saves substantial amounts of time. It also keeps tests more consistent because tests that are based on the same code will be identical.
However, as we saw above, certain types of tests, such as usability tests, are difficult to perform automatically. And even when you can automate tests, you may not have the development resources available to write testing code for every single test that you want to run. For these reasons, even highly efficient teams should expect to perform a certain amount of tests manually.
Automated vs. Comprehensive Testing
Automated testing is also sometimes compared to comprehensive testing, but this comparison can be a bit misleading. Comprehensive testing refers to all types of tests that must take place to ensure an application works as required for all users – and also that it's secure.
Thus, comprehensive testing is not the opposite of automated testing. On the contrary, automated tests are usually an important component of comprehensive testing, since running every type of test is easier when you automate them. That said, just because you automate some or most tests doesn't mean you're performing comprehensive testing. You need to be covering every key type of test for your testing routine to be comprehensive.
Continuous Testing
Continuous testing is another buzzword you may encounter in discussions about types of software tests. Continuous testing means running tests routinely and automatically as part of the software development process. It implies that tests are well integrated into the SDLC – often with the help of cloud-based test infrastructure that makes it possible to run a wide variety of tests on demand – and its goal is to ensure that tests are as efficient and comprehensive as possible.
That said, continuous testing doesn't mean that testing happens on a literally continuous basis. There may be moments when no testing is taking place if you're waiting for new code to test. But as long as you test regularly, and provided that each step in the SDLC triggers relevant types of tests, you can say you're performing continuous testing.
Quality software is thoroughly vetted software
The world of software development is all about teamwork these days, and that includes testing too!
Testing doesn’t have to be overwhelming, boring, or entirely manual. When you embrace testing as a shared responsibility between QA, software developer engineers in test (SDETs), and developers it helps empower all parties involved to quickly deliver high-quality and reliable software. Getting familiar with comprehensive automation tools like Sauce Labs, and becoming comfortable with all the right essential tests – including unit integration, functional, performance, and security testing – is critical to achieving continuous integration.
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