Beating 3 challenges to enterprise Continuous Testing - By Wolfgang Platz
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Beating 3 challenges to enterprise Continuous Testing By Wolfgang Platz Founder and Chief Strategy Officer | Tricentis
Global 2000 organizations are increasingly being pitted against nimble startups set on disrupting their
industry. Accelerating application delivery is a key part of maintaining a competitive advantage, but it’s
hard for enterprise organizations to keep pace. They’re burdened by everything from complex application
stacks (including mainframes, packaged applications, and decades-old custom applications as well as
modern interfaces), to deeply-entrenched processes built for dramatically different delivery models, to
strict compliance requirements. At times, it can seem like you’re competing in the Tour de France while
towing a child in a bike trailer.
All too often, it’s testing that’s holding back the speed of application delivery—specifically, lack of a mature
Continuous Testing practice that provides near real-time feedback on whether the application has an
acceptable level of business risk. Nobody doubts that Continuous Testing is essential. But making it a
reality is a challenge in any development environment, and it’s an especially pointed pain in enterprise
environments with all the burdens and baggage mentioned above.
Here’s a look at 3 of the challenges enterprises commonly face when trying to implement an effective
Continuous Testing practice—and how top organizations have solved them.1
INTRODUCING AND EXPANDING TEST AUTOMATION WHERE
IT HAS TRADITIONALLY BEEN MOST DIFFICULT
Having a core set of automated tests that expose business risks as they’re introduced is a key component
of Continuous Testing. Yet, the latest World Quality Report found that test automation has been stalled
around a dismally low 15% for years now. You can’t—and shouldn’t—automate all your testing efforts. But
if you want fast feedback on whether the latest changes broke any critical business processes, ramping
up automation is essential.
The problem is that getting started can be hard, and keeping it going is, unfortunately, even harder. Most
large organizations have at least one or two failed test automation initiatives under their belt, so quality
leaders are understandably reluctant to spearhead another.
Yet, many brave QA leaders are up for the challenge and achieve success. What’s their secret? At a high level,
they remain laser-focused on the long-term goal of sustainable test automation and architect the deep-
seated process and cultural change to support that. Getting it started requires finding a test automation
approach that crosses the various technologies involved in your business processes (technology-agnostic
or broad technology support) and can be adopted rapidly and broadly by your existing team members
(whatever their current skillset may be). Keeping it going also requires addressing what I call “the three
nightmares of test automation: test maintenance, test data, and test environments.”
1
These organizations’ stories were presented publicly at Tricentis conferences; the videos can be found at
https://www.tricentis.com/resources/?tri-resource-type=121#archive-results
tricentis.com © 2021 Tricentis USA Corp. All rights reserved | 2Here are some tips from how Linde, the world’s largest gas company, introduced test automation into
the 100+ year-old company’s complex web of highly-customized SAP, Salesforce, web, and mobile apps:
• Think long and hard about where automation will have the greatest impact, then focus on creating
stable automation for those business-critical use cases. You can gain much more attention and
internal support by automating a handful of high-impact end-to-end processes than you can by
automating thousands of ill-conceived tests.
• Root out the “number of tests” mindset. For years, many organizations have been using “number of
tests” to measure the extent of testing and even to compensate testing providers. More tests that
address the same business risks don’t help. In fact, they hurt. They consume resources to create as
well as resources to maintain—eating into your test automation ROI.
• Sometimes you need to cut your losses. If an approach or tool really isn’t working for your existing
resources (e.g., it’s too technical or doesn’t suit your ecosystem), understand what’s needed instead,
and resolve to address it going forward.
ASSESSING THE “RELEASE READINESS” OF NEW FUNCTIONALITY THAT SPANS
DISTRIBUTED TEAMS AND APPLICATIONS
A primary goal of Continuous Testing is to determine if a release candidate is ready for production. As
described above, you absolutely need to ensure that the changes in each release don’t break existing
functionality. But you also need to test the new functionality to ensure that it works and meets expectations.
Making the ultimate go/no-go release decision can be a bit of a guessing game when different teams are
responsible for different components and layers of the application: the browser interface, the mobile
experience, the various packaged apps at work behind the scenes (SAP, Salesforce, ServiceNow), and
all the microservices, APIs, and integration platforms that are probably gluing it all together. They’re
likely developing new functionality at different cadences, and testing “their” parts in different ways, using
different testing practices and different tools. But the user doesn’t make those distinctions. They expect
it all to “just work”… flawlessly.
Moët Hennessy-Louis Vuitton (LVMH), the parent company behind luxury brands such as Christian Dior,
TAG Heuer, and Dom Perignon, recently decided to streamline their testing process to support ambitious
plans for e-commerce growth. They perfected the art of testing new functionality efficiently and making
release decisions that ensure the ultimate user experience:
tricentis.com © 2021 Tricentis USA Corp. All rights reserved | 3• Take a structured approach to testing new functionality. To better defend both the customer
and the brand, each QA team took a deep dive into the DNA of the brand and its core customer profiles
(personas). They then developed new test strategies for checking how the customer experiences the
brand and captured them as reusable “rollout kits.”
• Reuse, reuse, reuse. They built a library of strategically-designed test building blocks that enable
70-90% reuse across their launches. These building blocks map to an array of test automation tools
that they combine to view, interact with, and evaluate the site like a human—on a broad variety of
devices. With this head start on automation, they can start testing early in each release cycle and gain
fast feedback as they implement and refine new user stories.
• Connect the dots. All the disparate testing data for web, mobile, Salesforce eCommerce, ERPs,
WMSs, CRMs, etc. is integrated into a single pane of glass that provides real-time insight into release
readiness by persona, feature, and tech layer. They can always tell, at a glance, what’s ready to release,
what’s holding the release back, and who’s responsible for getting it on track.
BALANCING COLLABORATION WITH AUTONOMY
For years now, the trend has been towards autonomous, self-governing development teams that choose
the practices and tools best suited for their culture and projects. This is great for team motivation…but it’s
not ideal for collaboration. At the same time, another competing trend—towards highly-interconnected
applications—has made collaboration even more critical. At the points of intersection, there’s a huge
opportunity to share test artifacts (as well as code and deployment artifacts). However, that’s easier said
than done now that so many teams have grown accustomed to using their own processes and tools.
How do you promote cross-team Continuous Testing collaboration without homogenizing all the distinct
ways of working that different teams have invested considerable resources in developing and perfecting?
Dell has devised an effective strategy to tap synergies across 30 divisions working across 20+ different
test automation frameworks:
• Abstraction is key. They analyzed the elements of DevOps success from a high-level philosophical
perspective, then crafted an abstract CI/CD/CT architecture that specified what activities to address
(source control, requirements management, test management, etc.) without prescribing low-level
implementation details on how to complete them.
• For Continuous Testing, they established an overarching layer that enables them to find and run
relevant test assets without even thinking about what test automation framework is used behind the
scenes. This way everyone can share but no team has to compromise.
tricentis.com © 2021 Tricentis USA Corp. All rights reserved | 4• For new projects, they plan to standardize on a test framework that’s flexible enough to cover their
various application stacks and delivery cadences. They will make it available to existing teams and
projects, but nobody is being forced to change.
FOCUS ON THE RIGHT APPROACH FOR YOUR CHALLENGES, YOUR APPLICATIONS,
AND YOUR RESOURCES
There’s no such thing as enterprise Continuous Testing in a box. As you can see from just these few
examples, the top challenges and potential solutions vary widely, and yours will too.
To succeed, you really need to get real. Take a long, hard look at what you’re working with, and craft an
approach accordingly. Don’t expect long-time manual testers to download some open source testing
tools and automate processes that span packaged applications, custom applications, mainframes, and
more. Likewise, don’t expect a high-performing, tech-savvy team to give up the home-grown or highly-
customized approach they poured significant time and resources into over the years.
Continuous Testing itself is all about assessing the impact of change. Your approach to Continuous Testing
must also be built around change: what can you do from a technology, process, and change management
perspective to ease the transition from your current state to an enterprise Continuous Testing process
that’s achieving your organization’s goals with respect to quality, speed, and efficiency.
Note: If you’d like to explore these and other enterprise Continuous Testing challenges in-depth, I invite
you to read my recent book, Enterprise Continuous Testing: Transforming Testing for Agile and DevOps.
DISCLAIMER: Note, the information provided in this statement should not be considered as legal advice. Readers are cautioned not to place undue
reliance on these statements, and they should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions or for achieving compliance to legal regulations.
tricentis.com © 2021 Tricentis USA Corp. All rights reserved | 5ABOUT TRICENTIS
Tricentis is the global leader in enterprise continuous testing, widely credited for reinventing
software testing and delivery for DevOps and agile environments. The Tricentis AI-based,
continuous testing platform provides automated testing and real-time business risk insight across your
DevOps pipeline. This enables enterprises to accelerate their digital transformation by dramatically
increasing software release speed, reducing costs, and improving software quality. Tricentis has been
widely recognized as the leader by all major industry analysts, including being named the leader in
Gartner’s Magic Quadrant five years in a row. Tricentis has more than 1,800 customers, including the
largest brands in the world, such as Accenture, Coca-Cola, Nationwide Insurance, Allianz, Telstra, Dolby,
RBS, and Zappos.
To learn more, visit www.tricentis.com or follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.
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