How Functional Testing Works in Agile and DevOps Models

For quality assurance and faster delivery; businesses today are moving towards agile and DevOps models. For the DevOps model, continuous testing is part of the process along with continuous integration and continuous software delivery to ensure faster release. Though there are many other testing methods like regression, security, and performance testing; the functional testing company leverages the development units for software release in DevOps and Agile methodologies. It is the major way for software development companies to release high-quality software in the shortest time to market. 

Functional Testing in Agile:

In traditional testing, which generally follows the waterfall model, the testing process comes after the completion of development. In the Agile methodology, the software is developed and tested simultaneously. The features of the product are being rolled out with every cycle consisting of development and testing in a sprint. 

The Agile environment allows the developer to develop the product or add new features or improve the code, and the tester performs the functional testing at the same time. In case, there are some changes done to the software, regression testing helps to make sure that the existing functionalities are unaffected by the new development. 

In an agile environment; the common functional testing types are sanity, component, smoke, and unit. Functional Testing helps to speed up the whole testing process; and assists in the early detection and removal of bugs. It also creates better collaboration among the teams and saves processing time. 

Functional Testing in DevOps:

The DevOps method follows better development, testing process, and faster release of the software. The complete software delivery lifecycle is streamlined and automated as it has integrated the CI (Continuous Integration) and CD (Continuous Delivery) pipelines. In this environment, everything including development and release is continuous and automated. The development, testing, integration, deployment, and monitoring processes are continuous. 

In every stage of the DevOps process, automated functional testing is performed inside the CI/CD pipeline to get assured software quality. In this environment, the developers often make changes to the source code, and eventually, they merge those changes to the central repository. Regression testing is required at this stage to make sure that the changes do not hamper the existing functionality of the software. 

In the DevOps process, functional testing detects the functional errors in the software much earlier.