Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.
For developers working with cloud-native technologies, software testing and quality assurance is a key part of product development. For most teams, testing has “shifted left,” so the quality of the code can be assessed as it moves through the CI/CD pipeline. This approach to quality assurance reflects the rise of DevOps and other modern development practices – developers today own their applications from end-to-end, and conducting testing early in the product life cycle is how they find potential bugs, save their organizations time and money and build products that delight their customers.
More recently, developers have added end-to-end API and browser tests into their CI/CD practices, extending the scope of their testing and quality assurance practices. By testing how code performs on different browsers and how it interacts with important data sources, developers have added another layer of quality testing to the early stages of their development processes. This has brought added benefits to other “shift left” practices, such as unit testing and security testing, and has led to a new understanding of quality assurance.
Traditional Approaches to QA Can’t Support the Pace of the Cloud
As companies have migrated to the cloud and adopted agile development methodologies that align with DevOps practices, they’ve encountered conflicting priorities between releasing code quickly and maintaining the highest level of quality on each release. Traditional manual testing techniques were not built for agile workflows, but instead supported older waterfall methodologies, in which testing could be conducted as a discreet instance before code went to production. With agile development, having a specific team in charge of all testing right before production is not the most sustainable approach, as it hinders the rapid pace of development that the cloud enables. This is why testing is “shifting left” to earlier stages of the development process, and why manual testing is being done by people embedded within each engineering team.
Cloud-Native Teams Have Shifted Left Into CI/CD Pipelines
As part of these agile methodologies, companies have moved toward leveraging CI/CD practices to ensure code is always in a state where it’s ready to be deployed. As code moves through these pipelines, developers want to ensure they are able to catch bugs earlier in the development cycle. To do this, they’ve taken to testing earlier and more often.
In particular, developers have increasingly recognized the value of end-to-end testing throughout their CI builds. API tests allow teams to verify end-to-end workflows by chaining HTTP requests and API calls, so they can validate all the layers of their systems from worldwide locations. Browser tests capture the user’s view during critical transactions, so teams can understand how UI changes are impacting web applications. Shifting both left into CI/CD pipelines saves time and money, as fixing a bug earlier in the development lifecycle is much less expensive than trying to fix it at the last minute, when it has grown in complexity and scope.
It also means many issues are caught by the developers, without the intervention of another engineer manually validating their work. This reduces the number of cycles required to find a bug, allowing the code to be circled back to developers, fixed and re-deployed to a testing environment. When regressions are caught early, developers can focus on the details that will make the product great.
Visibility of Metrics, Traces and Logs Drives Value
Running browser and API tests in your CI pipelines is beneficial, especially when teams can correlate these tests with data from across their stack – front end and back end, application and infrastructure. With correlated metrics, traces and logs that can be accessed easily without toggling between different products, teams will have the full context necessary for both detecting and troubleshooting failed tests. Detecting the failed tests allows for the rollback of bad code before it goes to production, and the correlated full stack data can be used to troubleshoot and fix any issues not caught during the development stage. This creates a new culture of quality assurance, in which maintaining quality is a holistic process that involves every part of the development cycle, and draws on data from every part of the stack.
Consistent Quality Requires Collaboration
This change in quality assurance goes beyond the practice of shifting browser and API testing left, and represents a fundamental change in how engineering teams collaborate within an organization. Testing happens before code goes to production, continues with robust monitoring once code is live, involves data from across the stack and is the responsibility of teams from various parts of the business. With this collaborative approach, for example, a front end engineer can easily identify an issue in the integration of their latest changes with the way the back end APIs are structured. They can then engage with the back end team owning this service to collaboratively iterate and find the best solution to resolve the issue. It may start with a shift left, but, ideally, it ends with the removal of silos and the opening of communication channels among teams.
Automated QA Delivers Customer Value Faster
A fully operational approach to quality assurance means that issues are resolved faster, or even resolved while code is still in development, so they never become issues at all. This creates a virtuous cycle – fewer regressions means less downtime, which makes customers happy, and frees up engineers to build new products, which makes customers happier still. That baseline of reliability and customer experience enabled by effective quality assurance is what allows for new innovation that delivers value to customers.
