Agile DevOps focuses on moving changes through the pipeline as quickly as possible, which means that more operational tasks—like software deployment—will occur earlier. As a result, testing teams will begin assuming more responsibility in managing those deployments in order to perfect reputability. Tracy Ragan provides an overview of release automation as it relates to testing and explains how automation is key to achieving faster and leaner testing cycles. She discusses why deploying new code across diverse environments can be really tricky and slow, and how properly implemented release automation will streamline code deployments across the lifecycle. Release automation may sound like a topic important to production control teams, but as processes are shifted left, testing teams will take on more responsibility in continuous deployment and associated infrastructure components.

To emulate production-like conditions that cannot be tested on the unit level, many integration and functional tests need a realistic environment. However, performing these tests in a production-like environment is fraught with problems—test data management issues, tests that are difficult to execute repeatedly, and network traffic that causes long-running test execution times. Instead of having to deal with these problems and others, Irene Dhong employs Docker to simulate dependencies. Learn how you can take advantage of Dockerized dependencies for quick test writing, reusability of common development code, and the ability to test early and often on a very low functional level. Irene describes how her development team is using Docker to implement more effective TDD and unit testing environments because Docker utilizes similar infrastructure both on the development and DevOps side. Join in to get Dockerized, too.

Most software organizations have a test automation initiative—some just beginning and others humming right along. Typically, these initiatives focus on traditional automation—using a software package to automate test cases or user stories. However, if you use only the traditional approaches to automation, you will miss opportunities to exploit the complete powers of automation. Paul Grizzaffi shares real-world examples where non-traditional automation or “automation assist” approaches, including high volume automated testing, have provided high business value testing in his company. He highlights instances where traditional methods could not have provided the same level of testing. Paul shares thoughts to keep in mind when implementing automation assists and demonstrates examples of helpers he’s created from tools not traditionally used for test automation.

The combination of microservice architectures and continuous delivery (CD) create a difficult scenario for integration and release testing. Even though microservices often introduce a huge number of integrations and transitive dependencies, testing still must be completed quickly to keep the pipeline flowing smoothly. Robert Williams surveys the techniques and tools available today for testing one or more microservices against a mix of real and virtualized dependencies in various stages of the CD pipeline. He explores structured testing around multiple versions of those services and their dependencies. Robert demonstrates semantic versioning and a console for traffic shaping so you can specify a range of versions of microservice dependencies and automatically test the candidate service against a range of real or virtualized dependencies.