The Journey to Continuous Testing

Capital One’s highly integrated environment creates many interdependencies for its agile teams. Because these dependencies were not being completed until late in their sprints, Adam Auerbach says that Capital One faced prolonged integration and regression testing phases and did not realize expected improvements in quality or time-to-market. As technology leaders pushed for continuous delivery (CD), testing needed to shift left and occur simultaneously with development. To shift left, the testing community needed to learn basic development skills, including Ruby and Java, to take advantage of advanced automation practices, service virtualization, and the continuous integration (CI) pipeline. Adam shares Capital One’s experience implementing continuous testing and describes its core principles. He explains service virtualization and the CI/CD pipeline and why they are important concepts for testers to understand and leverage. Since continuous testing is not easy and many companies have large organizations of manual testers, Adam provides a learning map that will help organizations plan the transition.