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When your development team is under pressure to keep releasing new functionality in order to stay ahead of the competition, the time spent on quality assurance (QA) activities can feel like one overhead that you could do without. After all, with automated CI/CD pipelines enabling multiple deployments per day, you can get a fix out pretty quickly if something does go wrong – so why invest the time in testing before release? The reality is that scrimping on software testing is a false economy.

Over the last several decades, there has been a shift in the competency of software testing. Currently, testing does not include notifying the developer of any flaws found. It has a broad scope and is a phase that must be completed from the very beginning of a project’s development. The testing life cycle of an application has become more process-oriented and diverse due to agile. Typically, the SDLC is the only thing an organization focuses its attention on.

Hey Perplexed, We’re huge advocates for testing in production, and that includes performing chaos engineering/continuous verification in production. But you’re right to want to be cautious about exactly how you are performing these tests. After all, it’s chaos engineering, not just pure unbridled chaos.

When it comes to the applications, websites, and services we build, the end user ultimately determines whether or not the end product is successful. Even the greatest concepts can fall short if the application does not consistently meet the evolving needs and expectations of the user. Just look at what happened to sites like Myspace or Yahoo.

Development is no longer a linear journey from point A to point B. As more projects shift into a state of organic growth, user feedback and constant experimentation are increasingly becoming the norm, if not the standard for engineering. “In order to support this rapid experimentation, we’re beginning to embrace new working methods and practices,” said Vinodh Ravi, Executive Director of Platform Engineering at JPMorgan Chase.

Performance is a vital component of user experience. Users will leave—and likely not come back—if your site is slow. If they stay, they’ll be less likely to buy from you if their experience is subpar. To add insult to injury, they’re even less likely to find your app to begin with, since Google punishes poorly-performing sites in the search results. To solve the problem of poor performance, knowledge of what impacts performance is essential.

Software is one of the most complex tools invented for practical use. One misplaced character can break an entire application. So, careful testing is an essential requirement before publishing any code. In this article, you will learn about two fundamental types of software testing, unit testing and integration testing, and how your team can implement them in your CI/CD pipelines to validate your code quickly and deliver new features to your users with confidence.