Integrating Continuous Testing

In previous chapters, you learned about the different types of techniques that are used to help increase the rate at which you deliver changes to your production environment. If you are already using these techniques in your daily work, you will quickly notice that this is only possible if your work is of sufficient quality. If the quality of your work is not high enough, you will face many outages or issues and your end users will not be happy. To be successful, increasing the rate of change and increasing the quality of your work must go hand in hand. To assess the quality of your work and increase it, you first need to know what is meant by quality. This is where testing comes in. Testing is the discipline of reporting on the quality of software.

To introduce the topic of testing, this chapter will start by looking at how the quality of software development can be measured. After that, the topic of functional testing will be explored. As we progress...