A Holistic Approach to Testing in Continuous Delivery

@lisacrispin
With material from Abby Bangser, Ashley
Hunsberger, Lisi Hocke, Janet Gregory, & more
Copyright 2023 Lisa Crispin
A Holistic Approach to Testing in
Continuous Delivery
Lisa Crispin

@lisacrispin
A little about me
Co-founder, Agile Testing Fellowship
Testing consultant & trainer
lisa@lisacrispin.com
https://lisacrispin.com
Holistic Testing: Strategies
for Agile Teams
Holistic Testing for
Continuous Delivery
AgileTestingFellow.com
Test Automation U

@lisacrispin
Today I’m talking about:
● Building confidence for continuous delivery/deployment (CD)
● Guiding conversations about risk & test coverage
● Quality – a whole team responsibility
Image from meet.google.com

@lisacrispin
Some journeys go wrong
● Slow feedback loops
● Regression failures
● Unexpected impacts
● Technical & testing debt

@lisacrispin
What gets in your team’s way?
Stop and think for a minute. What’s the
biggest obstacle for your team being
successful with continuous delivery?
Photo by Matthew Hamilton on Unsplash

@lisacrispin
One example from my experience
● Team embraced XP practices – TDD, refactoring, pairing, continuous
integration, …
● Thousands of automated regression tests at every level
● Reliable deployment pipelines, app in cloud, blue/green deploy
But…
● Too few testers
● Still had manual release regression checklist
● No time for sufficient exploratory testing
This Photo by Unknown
Author is licensed under CC
BY-NC-ND

@lisacrispin
Making frequent small changes confidently takes:
● Collaboration
● Continuous improvement
● Continuous learning
● A holistic approach

@lisacrispin
8
Get everyone engaged
Operations
Specialist
Designer
????
Programmer Domain
expert
Tester

@lisacrispin
Guiding conversations with visuals

@lisacrispin
Visualize your pipeline, optimize feedback
Faster feedback
More confidence

@lisacrispin
Do your automated test suites give you confidence?
Confidence
Flaky tests?
Poor
coverage? Hard to
maintain?
Hard to
diagnose?

https://github.com/ahunsberger/TestSuiteDesign - Ashley Hunsberger

@lisacrispin
Some of my favorite Test Canvas questions
● What information should each suite provide? To
whom? How?
● How will the team know about test failures? Who is
responsible for looking into those?
● Do you pair on test automation, or do test code
reviews?
This Photo by Unknown Author is
licensed under CC BY-NC

@lisacrispin
Mitigating risks with automated regression tests

@lisacrispin
Talking about risk
Risk Storming
(https://riskstormingonline.com)
Traditional risk
analysis
Mind maps

@lisacrispin
Does your team know all the possible risks?
● Customers behave in unexpected ways
● Infrastructure components may fail
● External systems can impact ours
● …
What
do we
do?

@lisacrispin
Observability
● Ask the questions you didn’t know you’d need to ask - unknowns
● Complex systems fail in complex ways
● With enough information, we can respond quickly
Cindy Sridharan,
https://medium.com/@copy
construct/testing-in-
production-the-safe-way-
18ca102d0ef1

@lisacrispin
Holistic Testing
Janet Gregory
https://janetgregory.ca
/testing-from-a-
holistic-point-of-view/

@lisacrispin
In which stages do you currently get involved?

@lisacrispin
What makes it work?
● Commitment to a level of quality
○ Identifying what’s valuable to customers
○ Bug prevention over bug detection
○ Fast response to prod issues
● Diverse perspectives, skill sets, biases
● Competencies > roles

@lisacrispin
Cross-discipline pairing, ensemble testing
Picture from Ensemble Programming Guidebook, Maaret Pyhäjärvi

@lisacrispin
We’re humans! (or possibly dragons, donkeys, unicorns…)
Build relationships
● Friendly conversations
● Do food
● Share something useful
● Ask for help
Katrina Clokie has excellent tips in her book, A
Practical Guide to Testing in DevOps

@lisacrispin
Building a quality culture
• Transformative leaders
• Trust and psychological safety
• Whole team ”owns” product
• “You build it, you run it”
• Focus on quality, not speed

@lisacrispin
Principles of CD – Jez Humble & David Farley
● Build quality in
● Work in small batches
● Computers perform repetitive tasks, people solve
problems
● Relentlessly pursue continuous improvement
● Everyone is responsible

@lisacrispin
Get your team together and talk
What are our quality goals? Are we
committed to building quality in?
How can we apply the Holistic
Testing Model to fit testing activities
in throughout the software
development life cycle?

@lisacrispin
A few resources
● ”Agile Testing for the Whole Team” training course, https://agiletestingfellow.com
● Agile Testing Condensed, Agile Testing and More Agile Testing, Lisa Crispin and Janet
Gregory, https://agiletester.ca
● “Test Automation in DevOps”, A Test Automation U course by Lisa Crispin
https://testautomationu.applitools.com/test-automation-in-devops/
● Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble and David Farley, https://continuousdelivery.com
● A Practical Guide to Testing in DevOps by Katrina Clokie
https://leanpub.com/testingindevops
● Accelerate by Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, Gene Kim
● Ashley Hunsberger’s Test Suite Canvas
https://github.com/ahunsberger/TestSuiteDesign
● https://lisacrispin.com/observability-continuous-delivery-devops-related-resources/
● ExploreIt! Elizabeth Hendrickson

A Holistic Approach to Testing in Continuous Delivery

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