Rob Vanstone's presentation of "Moving to Continuous Delivery Without Breaking Your Code" from Test Expo in London 2015

1. Moving to Continuous
Delivery Without Breaking
Your Code
Rob Vanstone 22 October 2015

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Agenda
▪ The Need For Speed
▪ Testing is Changing
▪ A Central Hub for Application Quality For Your Pipeline
▪ Beyond Test Automation: Active Test Optimization

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About Me
▪ Sales Engineer, Consultant and generally a nosy person
▪ Traversed through all phases of the software development lifecycle
▪ Most time spent between Development and Operations (usually
both)
▪ Really enjoying the energy in testing right now
− Test specialists
− Developers who test
− Testers who code

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AboutXebiaLabs
We build tools to solve problems around DevOps and Continuous Delivery at scale

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The Need For Speed
▪ Every business is an IT business
− Known as “Software-defined Enterprise”, even traditionally brick and mortar business is becoming
software based
▪ Customers demand that you deliver new features faster whilst maintaining high
levels of quality
▪ If you don’t, your competitor probably will

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The Need For Speed
▪ What is so compelling about CD?
▪ Business initiative with cool technical implementation
▪ “CD eats DevOps for breakfast as the business eats IT”

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TheTwo Faces of CD
▪ A lot of focus right now is on pipeline execution
▪ …but there’s no point delivering at light speed if everything starts breaking
▪ Testing (= quality/risk) needs to be a first-class citizen of your CD initiative!

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TheTwo Faces of CD
▪ CD = Execution + Analysis
▪ = Speed + Quality
▪ = Pipeline orchestration + ..?

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SPECIFY INTEGRATE RELEASEREGRESSION
VALUE CHAINCONCEPT CASH
Test Effort
USER ACCEPTANCEDESIGN BUILD TEST
Testing is Changing

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SPECIFY INTEGRATE RELEASEREGRESSION
VALUE CHAINCONCEPT CASH
Test Effort
USER ACCEPTANCE
USER ACCEPTANCE
Acceptance
Driven Testing
“I add value by sharpening the
acceptance criteria of requested
features”
Automate ALL
“Test automation serves as the safety net
for my new functionality: I focus on running
the appropriate tests continuously during
the iterations”
T
E
S
T
D
E
S
I
G
N
B
U
I
L
D
D B
T
T D
Development = Test
Test = Development
“Testing is transforming to a
automation mindset and skill
instead of a separate activity”
Testing is Changing

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Testing is Changing: Challenges
▪ Many test tools for each of the test levels, but no single place to answer “Good
enough to go live?”
▪ Requirements coverage is not available
− “Did we test enough?”
▪ Minimize the mean time to repair
− Support for failure analysis
JUnit, FitNesse, JMeter, YSlow,
Vanity Check, WireShark, SOAP-UI,
Jasmine, Karma, Speedtrace,
Selenium, WebScarab, TTA,
DynaTrace, HP Diagnostics, ALM
stack AppDynamics, Code Tester for
Oracle, Arachnid, Fortify, Sonar, …

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Testing is Changing: Challenges
▪ Thousands of tests makes test sets hard to manage:
− “Where is my subset?”
− “What tests add most value, what tests are superfluous?”
− “When to run what tests?”
▪ Running all tests all the time takes too long, feedback is too late
▪ Quality control of the tests themselves and maintenance of testware
▪ Tooling overstretch

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Testing is Changing: Challenges

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Testing is Changing: Best Practices
▪ Focus on functional coverage, not technical coverage
▪ Say 40 user stories, 400 tests
− Do I have relatively more tests for the more important user stories?
− How do I link tests to user stories/features/fixes?
▪ Metrics
− Number of tests
− Number of tests that have not passed in <time>
− Flaky tests
− Duration

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Testing is Changing: Best Practices
▪ “Slice and dice” your test code
− Responsible team
− Topic
− Functional area
− Flaky
− Known issue
− etc.
▪ Radical parallelization
− Fail faster!

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MakingSense ofTest Results
▪ Real go/no go decisions are non-trivial
− No failing tests
− 5 % of failing tests
− No regression (tests that currently fail but passed previously)
− List of tests-that-should-not-fail
▪ Need historical context
▪ One integrated view
▪ Data to guide improvement

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Example Job Distribution
Build Deploy Int. Tests Test Test Test Perf. Tests
Build Deploy Int. Tests Test
Test
Test
Perf. Tests

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Example Job Distribution
Build Deploy Int. Tests Test Test Test Perf. Tests
Build Deploy Int. Tests Test
Test
Test
Perf. Tests
Simple pipelines – scattered test results

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MakingSense ofTest Results
Executing tests from Jenkins is great, but…
▪ Different testing jobs use different plugins or scripts, each with different
visualization styles
▪ No consolidated historic view available across jobs
▪ Pass/Unstable/Fail is too coarse
− How to do “Passed, but with known failures”?

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MakingSense ofTest Results
▪ Ultimate analysis question (“are we good to go live?”) is difficult to answer
▪ No obvious solution for now, unless all your tests are running through one
service

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TestAnalysis: Homebrew
24

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TestAnalysis: Custom Reporting
25

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A Central Hub for ApplicationQuality
What is needed:
1. A single, integrated overview of all the test (= quality, risk) information related
to your current release
2. …irrespective of where or by whom the information was produced
3. The ability to analyze and “slice and dice” the test results for different
audiences and use cases
4. The ability to access historical context and other test attributes to make real-
world “go/no-go” decisions

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Beyond Test Automation
Can we go further? How about
5. The ability to use the aggregated test results, historical contexts and other
attributes to invoke tests more intelligently?

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Beyond Test Automation
It’s a bit of an open question:
▪ Google: it’s too expensive and time-consuming to run all the tests all the time
- automated selection of a subset of tests to run
▪ Dave Farley: if you can’t run all the tests all the time, you need to optimize
your tests or you have the wrong tests in the first place

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Beyond Test Automation
Middle ground:
▪ Label your tests along all relevant dimensions to ensure that you can easily
select a relevant subset of your tests if needed
▪ Consider automatically annotating tests related to features (e.g.
added/modified in the same commit), or introducing that as a practice
▪ Use data from your test aggregation tool to ignore flaky/”known failure” tests
(and then fix those flaky tests, of course ;-))

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Summary
▪ Testing = Automation
− Testers are developers
▪ Structure and annotate tests
▪ Link to functions/features/use cases
▪ Radical parallelization
− Throwaway environments

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Summary
▪ CD = Speed + Quality = Execution + Analysis
▪ Making sense of scattered test results is still a challenge
▪ Need to figure out how to address real world go/no go decisions

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Summary
▪ CD = Speed + Quality = Execution + Analysis
▪ Making sense of scattered test results is still a challenge
▪ Need to figure out how to address real world go/no go decisions

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AnalyzingTest Results

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AnalyzingTest Results

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TaggingTests

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EvaluatingGo/No-go Criteria

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Next steps
▪ Next-Generation Testing: The Key to Continuous Delivery
https://xebialabs.com/resources/whitepapers/next-generation-testing-the-
key-to-continuous-delivery/
▪ An Introduction to XL TestView
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_17xKtB3iWU
▪ Download XL TestView
https://xebialabs.com/products/xl-testview/community

35. Thank you!
Come see us at our stand