How to Integrate Automated CI/CD Pipeline Testing: A Step-by-Step Guide?

The Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) approach is a collection of best practices that should be used to guarantee that you are reliably and consistently releasing product updates to your web application. With each sprint carried over into a subsequent release cycle, your online application will almost definitely grow. It’s conceivable that a small team will initially be in charge of updating the code in your web application. In these situations, doing everything directly, creating the code, testing it independently, and deploying it to the live system is something you wouldn’t mind doing. But as your team grows, there will be more points of contact, and as you try to move all of the code changes from one staging scenario to another, the chance of error will rise. For Automated test suites, it is important to have many of them created for different purposes. Running any single test will cover all environments leading to a slowing down of procedures.

The CI/CD workflow is a crucial component in this respect. Any online organization’s performance depends heavily on how its Continuous Integration and Delivery pipelines are configured. 

What is Continuous Integration?

Developers would migrate new features into an environment one at a time, in total isolation, according to traditional models of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). There were issues when multiple developers were working on various features simultaneously. Through a shared repository, Continuous Integration ensures that developers can methodically commit many changes to the primary branch of your web application. 

The technique of Continuous Integration is employed to achieve this. Suppose your team’s developers take advantage of the Continuous Integration best practice and use the tools and methods. In that case, they had to integrate new code into a central repository numerous times throughout the day. 

What is Continuous Delivery?

In terms of Continuous Delivery, it only happens when CI execution is completed. A best practice called Continuous Delivery makes sure a pipeline is in place that releases code updates automatically from one staging location to another. This procedure “delivers” code changes constantly, as the name implies.

All of the procedures that must be followed before your software can be distributed are included in Continuous Delivery. This entails conducting thorough tests, completing builds, code signing, performing quality assurance with testing tools, and process documentation. 

What is Continuous Deployment?

In actuality, Continuous Deployment is the next stage after Continuous Delivery. With the addition of this new function, Continuous Delivery has been enhanced. Automating the Deployment of the new update of the version on the production advances Continuous Delivery one step further. 

The procedure, the checks, and the tests set up must ensure a crash-free experience; this is the only requirement for Continuous Deployment. It will help if you put more effort into creating extremely rigorous test cases now that the system is completely automated. This is because once your migration has been finished, there is no way to review it directly. After all, once something is gone, it cannot be recovered.

A step-by-step guide: How to integrate automated CI/CD pipeline testing?

In this section, let’s start building, integrating, and operating effective CI/CD pipelines.

It is crucial to build a test platform and framework and access the right testing tools that can easily integrate with the overall CI/CD pipeline to enable thorough testing, a quicker feedback loop, and overall product success.

The execution of multiple testing types, including but not limited to unit tests, integration tests, API tests, automated functional tests, performance tests, security tests, accessibility tests, visual tests, cross-browser compatibility tests, and among many others, is essential for a successful CI/CD pipeline. 

A CI/CD procedure is set up in stages, with development being the first.

Development

Developers write code, which they then submit to a central repository using a program. Ensuring that no errors are introduced during the Integration of new code is one of the most difficult tasks. This is because if encounters are not frequent, many issues may arise. Regularly validating and merging the code is one method that can be used to address this problem. Every time the repository is modified, such as when code is uploaded, the process is started. After the pipeline has received the code, the build process begins. 

Build

The code is compiled, dependencies are identified, artifacts are created, and all are saved in a repository during this process. Environments are created, containers are built and made to work on various pods, and pre-baked images are stored to be rolled out using infrastructure as code. Various testing procedures are conducted after the environment has been set up.

Testing

It is imperative to put a lot of stress on creating a continuous feedback testing cycle that is fast and consistent during the testing phase. Making early and continuous testing easier to handle should be the aim of testing pipelines. Unfortunately, it remains one of the biggest challenges organizations face today. Let’s examine what it takes to build a CI/CD that significantly increases testing productivity before breaking it down into its components.

• Test Data
• Testing Architecture
• Test scripts 
• Dashboard, testing metrics, and Monitoring

Let’s examine each of them separately.

• Test Data

One of the biggest problems businesses must deal with is test data because teams cannot perform testing without the built-in historical data. Organizations will never be able to have a fully automated CI/CD pipeline without automating their data requirements. Testing findings must be built, managed, and maintained. Fostering a data construction and administration mindset that sees data as code is crucial.

The following benefits come from managing and keeping note of test results:

• To maintain stability
• Speeds up CI/CD
• Data security and governance
• Increase the team’s effectiveness.

Organizations must have clearly defined goals to manage test results successfully. 

Here are a few methods for dealing with data issues:

Tools for managing test data help us handle all of our data. If you have the right tool, you can use TDM, which stands for “Test Data management,” to overcome your issues across the entire company. By reducing the overall time spent on data generation, administration, testing environments, and product testing, TDM would aid in reducing the time it takes to bring a product to market.

A tool that can produce XML based on the database’s relations and structure is necessary to generate seed data. With XML files, data filling could be done in real-time. The seed data loader process could theoretically be completely automated. Building and managing a data lake is feasible, which can then be “plug and play” connected to any pipelines to meet any data requirements. When dealing with pipelines, it might be feasible to use caching solutions to get faster data storage and recovery.

• Testing Architecture

Today, environments are managed by infrastructure as code, but testing requirements are not yet fully considered.

To do this, you must:

1. Make sure the necessary levels of scalability, reliability, and availability are met when building a CI/CD pipeline to perform various kinds of testing.
2. Integrate testing infrastructure about, among other things, speed, automation, and security.
3. Permit simultaneous testing across various platforms, operating systems, and browsers with different setups.
4. Accessibility, utility, and end-to-end test infrastructure should all be considered part of the Continuous Integration and delivery (CI/CD) process.
5. With the aid of LambdaTest, testing can be carried out uninterruptedly across various devices and browsers. More than 3,000 distinct OS, device, and version configurations are available for testing. 
6. Additionally, you can connect straight to popular CI/CD platforms like Jenkins, Travis CI, TeamCity, and others.
7. Try it out immediately.

• Testing scripts

Businesses cannot have a successful CI/CD pipeline that operates early in the cycle and across other stages, because many teams lack automated performance, security, accessibility, and test cases.

Here are some answers to these issues and how to incorporate them into the CI/CD pipeline to facilitate early testing.

1. Testing at the beginning is crucial. 
2. Automated performance evaluations should be run using API calls, AWR reports, database queries, and other statistical data.
3. Automation for service calls.
4. Use traffic mocking to capture and replay test environment traffic on production platforms.
5. Mocking, virtualization, and test modeling are all practical approaches.
6. Make investments in software and hardware that can create test plans on their own.

Monitoring

Dashboards, Monitoring and Reports are all crucial components when building a CI/CD process. One of the most important steps in building a CI/CD pipeline is collecting important testing metrics so that choices can be made with knowledge.

A single dashboard that can broadcast all testing data across all testing types is necessary. The report should be created to help in quickly identifying, isolating, and fixing problems. It’s crucial to keep an eye on the production environment.

Deploy 

The software is prepped for release to the operational environment during the deployment phase in a way that requires no manual intervention, has the least downtime possible, and has no impact on end users. Organizations can choose from a wide range of business strategies, and which ones they implement will rely on their specific needs and conditions. 

Speed, agility, and the delivery of bug-free products are crucial, and these cannot be accomplished without a successful pipeline for Continuous Integration and Delivery. This is because more and more companies are embracing and relocating to online and SaaS environments.

The Continuous Integration and delivery pipeline cannot be completed without a strong testing process setup. Cross-browser testing, automating native, visual testing and hybrid mobile applications, and many other things are just a few of the testing process requirements. Building effective CI/CD pipelines is essential for companies to achieve organizational success and concentrate on enhancing customer experiences.