It is well known that the biggest challenge for any organization is changing requirements. Find a way to quickly address these requirements while reducing the quality of delivery. Agile software development methods followed by most organizations play a critical role in dealing with this competitive situation. Agile methods require integrating product components, deploying the product in a pre-production environment, and testing it frequently. A simplified test choreography process will help achieve this goal.

Test automation choreography helps developers improve the testing process by eliminating the possibility of human error during the process.

Test Choreography Definition

Let’s take a closer look at the word choreography. An orchestra is a group of instruments led by a conductor that play in sync to create harmonious melodies. Here, we can associate choreography with a set of synchronized tests to create a harmonious software test. In simple terms, choreography is about automating many tasks together, that is, fully automating the entire IT-driven process. The test Choreography framework is designed to create multiple automated tests that run one after the other. It is the most critical element of an automated test strategy. There is no doubt that test automation is the future of software testing, and if testers do not properly understand automation and do not take full advantage of it, they may suffer these losses in the future. Therefore, test orchestration becomes a powerful strategy for continuous, holistic test automation of software products.

Test orchestration and automation

A test orchestration is considered a set of automated tests that are scheduled for linear execution. Test automation is the automation of precise tasks with the help of test tools and scripts. Automation processes individual tasks, while test choreography optimizes the entire workflow by automating planned tests in a predefined order. A set of tasks can range from launching a web site to integrating an application. Automated testing is performed at the script level and is the domain of the development team. Testers and DevOps people create test and test environments, and then use various testing tools to automate and execute those tests. Choreography is more of a developer thing and is viewed as a plan rather than a tool. So we can say that automation is more about executing tests, and choreography is more about the techniques that execute those tests. Choreography, therefore, is a broader concept. It controls the type of tests to be executed, when they need to be executed, in what order they are executed, and whether any human intervention is required.

Test the benefits of choreography

Test choreography can be difficult compared to automation. It provides a new approach to testing and takes a broad look at the entire testing process to best simplify and optimize testing. Therefore, test choreography can be very beneficial. First, it would completely eliminate the need for human intervention in the testing process, eliminating any possibility of human error. With the help of appropriate tools such as Selenium Orchestrator, detailed reports can be generated on each automated task. It allows quality analysts, project leaders, programmers, and other interested teams to gain insight into the visibility, update information, and current state of the application. Information such as which tests failed or succeeded is crucial for the QA team to analyze problem areas.

Automation gives the user the impression that something has improved in speed. Once the process and workflow are harmonized, it brings a whole new set of benefits. IT saves overall IT costs and improves unit efficiency by shifting attention to topics that require deep human thought; It standardizes products and workflows to make them reliable and consistent.

Test automation generates a lot of data to explain the latest state of the application. You can view the aspirations of various stakeholders in an organization in charts and graphs. It also allows for quick and intuitive identification of problems and degradation qualities of the application.

Automated test choreography strategies

There is no getting around the fact that choreography is a complex subject. Not all DevOps professionals are skilled at executing test choreography correctly. Teams need to master the complexity of the field. It is necessary to upgrade related skills, and sometimes organizations will even create a whole new set of specialties and well-equipped professionals when the need arises. Defining who will play which role in choreography and automation overcomes many of the issues that affect quality of service and timely delivery. While this may disrupt the team’s existing strategies and solutions, simply adding them to the portfolio yields more long-term benefits. With the right strategy, the transition from automated tests to choreographed automated tests becomes effortless. In addition, it is easier to do all of the above by adding well-supported orchestration tools to improve the process. The following points must be considered when choosing the right tool.

  • First, infrastructure or software development workflows require different tools to do their jobs.
  • Second, do you need to check whether it meets industry standards? Can it handle zooming in and out of different requirements? Does it support data and analytics? Is the task easy?
  • Finally, consider organizational and IT deployment size and operating system compatibility factors.

Automation/orchestration tools

  • Ansible: It supports continuous delivery in applications. IT is open source and supports infrastructure choreography tools that automate IT’s repetitive tasks.
  • Control-m: Its use is primarily related to the work of business services, so it can orchestrate their business applications and data sources. It usually focuses on the day-to-day activities of the business.
  • Jenkins: It’s focused on software delivery technologies. It supports continuous delivery and integration. It is based on the Java virtual Machine and has more than 1500 plug-ins to automate software.
  • Kubernetes: It coordinates storage infrastructure workloads, computing, and networking. It is a container platform for orchestrating applications built and delivered in containers.

Other scheduling and choreography tools that can’t be ignored are Nomad, Rancher, Marathon, Mesosphere, Selenium Orchestrator, and others.

Test orchestration and CI/CD

Test choreography is a valuable concept when it comes to continuous development and DevOps. It enables true continuous testing by allowing early testing and error detection and resolving problems before they begin to affect the development cycle. A well-planned automated test choreography process will help testers test applications end-to-end and repeatedly. Because these two aspects of reliability and repeatability are core strengths of automation, it means that organizations can quickly test and handle errors before any vulnerability occurs. As more and more processes are choreographed, engineers focus on developing other important tasks to achieve more specified goals.

The ultimate goal of automated test choreography is to overcome the challenges of the CI/CD pipeline. It will do this by maximizing efficiency, optimizing test management processes, and speeding application deployment. A smart test automation orchestration strategy will speed up the completion of the software development life cycle, with the goals: fewer perceived errors, shorter release cycles, and higher quality software reliable testing.

Learn what

The goal of choreography seems clear: to improve the efficiency of the test automation process. Its adoption will result in the maintenance of shorter release cycles and better software quality, in other words, the reinforcement of a complete test automation strategy. Test automation choreography is the real future of quality assurance.

As organizations continue to evolve, the need to adopt test choreography becomes a top priority. Choreography is a one-stop solution for handling complexity, no matter how complex their software development life cycle and toolset for managing infrastructure and deploying applications.

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