Continuous integration

Continuous integration is a best practice in Agile and DevOps development methodologies. The objective of continuous integration is to prevent integration nightmares late in a project, which can occur when multiple developers work on code independently and wait to merge their work with other developers until they’ve completed work on their own components.

Continuous integration requires developers to integrate their work with the main version of the codebase, known as the trunk, on a regular basis, often multiple times per day. Automated builds and automated tests validate the changes to code, identifying bugs or regression issues. By integrating code regularly, CI enables development teams to fix bugs and integration issues earlier in the process, when remediation is easier and less costly.

• Fewer merge conflicts. As developers working on different aspects of an application merge their code together, there are inevitably conflicts to be worked out. Continuous integration allows these conflicts to be resolved on a daily basis, minimizing the time, complexity, and cost of this task.
• Faster feedback. Continuous integration provides developers with quick feedback on the code they’re writing, making it easier to find and fix errors.
• Better collaboration. Because it enables developers to constantly work with the latest codebase, continuous integration significantly minimizes the risk of issues in complicated software applications. Additionally, changes to an application’s backend are immediately available for front-end developers, mitigating a perennial challenge in constructing large applications.
• Support for continuous deployment. Continuous integration makes it possible for development teams to achieve continuous deployment, where an application can be made available to the customer at any time.
• Greater productivity. Continuous integration helps developers be more productive by freeing them from manual tasks and encouraging practices that help minimize the number of bugs and errors in their coding.
• Easier scaling. CI allows organizations to more easily scale the size of their development team, codebase, and infrastructure.
• Accelerated timelines. CI enables development teams to deliver updates to customers with greater speed and frequency.

Automated testing is a core feature of continuous integration. The ability to regularly test code for small errors is an integral part of the CI process.

There are several key types of tests that are common to continuous integration.

• Unit tests validate the behavior of individual functions or bits of code.
• Integration tests ensure that multiple components work correctly together and that components integrate as required with other services.
• Acceptance tests ensure that software meets the requirements of specific business cases.
• Smoke tests are designed to test the minimal functionality of the system and ensure that any fundamental issues are identified.
• Regression tests determine whether any new code changes result in loss of functionality in the software.
• UI tests make sure that an application works correctly from a user’s perspective.

Managing testing in the CI process requires superior test management and test automation tools.

Tricentis Tosca is a market-leading intelligent test automation solution that optimizes and accelerates end-to-end testing of your entire digital landscape. By taking the bottlenecks out of testing and the the risk out of software releases, Tosca enables enterprises to accelerate innovation and deliver better business results with more confidence. Powered by Vision AI (a next generation AI-driven test automation technology) Tricentis Tosca provides continuous testing to support continuous integration. With Tosca, you can:

• Test virtually any enterprise, custom, homegrown, and mobile application across your entire IT landscape, with support for 160+ technologies
• Empower your business, QA and IT teams to utilize a no-code testing solution so they can create and maintain reusable test assets at speed and scale – regardless of their skill level
• Achieve extreme shift left testing by using Vision AI to build test automation based on mockups and run those same tests as the application evolves
• Simulate environments that are difficult or costly to deploy through service virtualization, and provision on-demand, high-quality test data so you can run your end-to-end tests much earlier in the testing lifecycle
• Shift from manual testing to test automation and boost automation rates to 90%+
• Track controls on any technology in real time, enabling automation at the speed of sight
• Stay current with application changes, regardless of the underlying platform, to avoid massive rework as the application evolves
• Manage every type and level of testing throughout the software testing lifecycle
• Leverage Tosca Continuous Integration together with Distributed Execution to run Tosca tests faster and at scale across your build pipeline

Along with Tosca, Tricentis offers a suite of testing solutions from unified test management, end-to-end data integrity testing, app-native testing, performance and load testing, including smart impact analysis. It even supports every flavor and type of testing from black box testing, white box testing, exploratory testing, regression testing and chaos engineering.