The “Quality at Speed” movement – or delivering high-quality products in a short period – has expanded beyond the software industry: it appears in the standard playbook of companies in health care, finance, etc. This new movement pushes QA teams to continuously reinvent their software development cycle with advancing technological practices. Among those new game-changing strategies, many have chosen to focus on test orchestration and quality analytics, which are the focal point of the Katalon TestOps.

Test Orchestration and The Future of Testing

The Rising Ground of Shift-left and Shift-right

As QA teams race to keep pace with the frequent changes in the industries, traditional project management models, i.e., the Waterfall approach, prove inflexible and time-consuming. It requires sacrificing either customer relevance or testing quality as the works are in sequential order and depend heavily on each other. Therefore, teams started to adopt efficient Agile-based approaches, making way for the rise of “shift left” and “shift right” testing.

These practices mean both Developers and QAs jointly test the product at every stage of the software development process (CI/CD). Instead of waiting to the end of the development cycle, shift-left testing means teams test application earlier, in much smaller units, and more frequently. On the other hand, shift-right employs testing after product release to see the operation under real-world conditions. Combining these methods has had proven success in detecting bugs earlier at a lower cost, increasing test reliability, and enhancing product quality.

Test Orchestration, Magic Solution or Problem Pitfall?

While shift-left and shift-right have risen in popularity, staying effective is a challenge for some product development teams. Without a sound plan, this transformation may cost more time and money than it saves. Among the solutions to the tricky dilemma is test orchestration.

Test orchestration helps schedule and manage a series of automated test components (databases, environments, etc.) during the entire workflow: from test planning, management, execution to configuration, and analytics. As it provides a holistic picture of the whole testing stage, there’s no doubt that test orchestration is among future practices to streamline and simplify the QA process. Developers and testers will have continuous, comprehensive visibility into application quality, increasing confidence to make a go/no-go release decision.

However, many teams are struggling to implement orchestration effectively. As a result, the lack of the right solution hinders comprehensive test coverage and efficiency, making it harder to deliver quality software. Transitioning to test orchestration seems scary. But if taken step by step with the right fit tool, every team can use its full potential.

Katalon TestOps – Orchestrate Tests & DevOps with Full Visibility, Speed, and Efficiency

Test Early, Test Often, Test Everywhere with Katalon TestOps

Frequent changes in product development cycles are associated with higher risks and complexity in the software testing process. In such scenarios, using only test automation is not enough to completely address the problem. Ultimately, every QA team demands the automated configuration, coordination, and management of the system and software to achieve quality objectives with minimal issues and time.

Understanding these struggles, Katalon introduces TestOps – the first, most comprehensive orchestration platform to connect the test management, planning, execution, and quality analytics of test automation and DevOps teams.

Capabilities made for Test Management

To simplify the first pillar of the testing pipeline (centralizing data and communication), Katalon TestOps acts as a command center, connecting all data and members into one shared, tight feedback loop.

Teams can perform projects with real-time dashboards for transparency, combine test cases across different frameworks and environments, among so many more. TestOps also offers various monitor and alerts functions for teams to quickly manage the coverage of requirements, test cases, and defects.

Capabilities made for Test Planning

Katalon TestOps focuses on maximizing ROI and resource utilization early on in the pipeline. New features like smart test scheduler and test planning mechanism grant teams the power to optimize test runs even in the planning stage. The new function of release readiness evaluation will help companies make the release decision with full confidence.

Capabilities made for Test Execution

At this stage, Katalon TestOps aims to minimize the manual steps in deployment, tool integration, and maintenance needed to run test cases. Among the benefits that TestOps offers are a unique serverless solution, automatic load balancing, parallel execution, and many more. The outcome of these innovations is a more efficient delivery cycle with less redundant procedures and extra rooms for innovation.

Capabilities made for Test Analytics

Leveraging the valuable user input from the beta stage, TestOps renovates the analytics system to bring quality insight into the CI/CD pipeline. Among the new features are new failure analysis, AI-backed out-of-the-box reports, and on-demand notifications. Teams can manage systems without continuous follow-ups. Combined with the instant feedback loops, any authorized member can make changes to codes and test scripts, increasing test coverage, application quality, and ultimately, project ROI.

For the full picture of functionality and benefits, check out Katalon TestOps

Katalon TestOps and Katalon Studio Use Case

Promising a swift testing experience, Katalon TestOps offers a comprehensive platform with test execution, team collaboration, and project management capabilities. Integratable with multiple testing tools and environments like Katalon Studio, Jenkins, CircleCI, etc., testers now have a centric testing ecosystem, with the orchestration ability for extensive control across DevOps teams and environments.

Test Management and Collaboration

To help teams with better communication and collaboration, TestOps provides a centralized dashboard with all transparency. At first glance, you can see all data updated minute-by-minute: requirement integration, person-in-charge, etc. Such features give the team full visibility with centralized workspaces for comments, dashboards, KPI tracking, etc.

Centralized test dashboard with managers and related documents

Test Planning

As this stage determines the ROI of server usage, it’s vital that teams run the right test on the right environment at the right time. Using test run schedule and release status, Katalon TestOps increase the efficiency by:

• Smart-select to help prioritize the most important tests to run next.
• Remotely trigger test cases via multiple methods such as schedulers, API, CI Plugins.

How to create Test Trigger with Test Repeat Interval Unit

Test Execution

Among the integrations available, teams can integrate with popular tools in CI/CD (i.e. Jenkins), test environments (i.e. Kobiton), test automation (i.e. Katalon Studio), and beyond. It’s also possible to create customized integration using SDK and REST APIs.

TestOps also automatically balances your Test Runs across available Test Environments in your CI provider. Combined with parallel execution, teams can efficiently execute their plan reliably and with clear visibility, hence drastically reducing your run times and delivery cycle.

Test Analytics

TestOps helps your team get the full picture of quality, coverage analysis, and dashboards showing some critical metrics for your businesses. Among the most highlighted features are Heat Map shows the requirement test coverage, customized alerts, live monitoring, and so on.

TestOps Advanced Report Coverage Heat Map

Real-Time Test Run Report

Conclusion

With the rise of Agile methodology, teams are constantly innovating their testing process. Among the best practice, test orchestration is a practical method providing cost reduction, better connections, and workflow optimization for all teams. As organizations now show the necessity of a centralized test platform, Katalon TestOps offers a collaboration hub of the QA teams for the whole testing phase. It’s the hope that with our solution, businesses now can achieve the goal of test early, test often, and test everywhere.