Book Review and Future Online Consumption Tolerances

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As I  mentioned earlier, QA is currently in an era of being a quickly evolving specialty field.  The old manual testing/ feedback loop is no longer a sustainable practice in the continuous delivery world we are currently living through and steamrolling towards completely. Fast delivery needs fast testing and equally as fast feedback.  Automation is big step towards quickening the testing process however there are several bottlenecks and limitations.
  • Automated tests can have a hard time mitigating risks.
  • The manual process of plowing through the test results can be cumbersome and unclear
  • Maintanence, maintenence, maintenence
Other variables come into play as well
  • Unstable test environments can derail an entire nightly test run pushing back deployment times
  • Security testing can be elusive
  • Managing of multiple tools to complete automation workflows 
Enter in Configuration Management Tools. Several companies are attempting to conquer all many of these issues. Parasoft is one of these companies and have put a book out recently (2016) titled Continuous Testing for IT Leaders.  It's a lean 70 pages however the context of those pages is efficiently written covering topics like the current state QA, automated testing vs continuous testing  and the ultra-important en-devour of risk assessment. It has a matter-of-fact presentation that confidently talks about these ideas without constantly berating you that a particular company is trying to sell you something.  I've been to my fair share of webinars and even though they are almost always structured to be educational, they always seemingly end up feeling like an advertisement for their specific product.

Another interesting topic the book hits upon is the idea that the current younger generation and the ones that will follow that will have highers expectations of software quality and their tolerance for service disruption will continue to decrease.  That makes sense because over time, as quality incrementally gets better and better, younger people will grow up continually experiencing those benefits and expect nothing less. To go with this, the competitive options available will continue to increase and the ability to switch to these vendors is only becoming easier and cheaper.

This connects with one of my goto topics. I mention brand reputation a lot in this blog and that is because it is one of the key differentiators between companies who provide similar services. One prospective client-to-be only needs to go online and do some research and read reviews on all the competing vendors to come away with an assumed well-formed opinion based solely on the thoughts of others.  This means that when they contact your company to see if you are a fit, they could already have most of their decision made up for them.

If you're in QA or DevOps and looking for ideas on how to potentially make your testing process better I recommend picking up Continuous Testing from Parasoft. It is a quick read with lots of relevant info relating to the current state of DevOps and testing.

Link:
https://www.amazon.com/Continuous-Testing-Wayne-Ariola/dp/1494859750 

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