One of the reasons application testing doesn’t occur as often or extensively as most IT organizations desire is because managing multiple simultaneous testing projects is complex. To help simplify the management of applications testing at scale, Plutora has updated Plutora Environments, its continuous delivery management platform, which now includes an ability to manage the availability, usage and configuration management involved in testing applications at scale.
Jeff Keyes, director of marketing, says Plutora Environments now provides a single repository through which all application testing can be managed, including identifying and provisioning available IT infrastructure resources.
Made available as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application, Plutora Environments provides needed governance and control capabilities. Without them, Keyes says, application testing tends to get de-prioritized when developers find it too challenging to quickly access the appropriate resources.
Capabilities added to the latest release of Plutora Environments include the ability to:
- Visually associate new code commits with the features or fixes via a dashboard,
- Ensure accuracy of test coverage across high-velocity tests,
- Trace updated code to specific defects or original requirements, and
- Automatically link change requests to associated test cases.
Keyes notes a large amount of IT infrastructure allocated to testing is being wasted due to a lack of oversight. In many ways, what’s been missing in many DevOps environments is some of the management functionality found it traditional IT service management (ITSM) software, he contends, and the latest release of Plutora bridges that gap within the context of an application testing environment.
Now that developers are being held more accountable for the quality of their applications, demand for access to testing resources will steadily increase, Keyes says. IT organizations then must balance a limited amount of resources against those demands—they may want to shift responsibility for application testing to the left as part of an integrated DevOps process, but to accomplish that goal, they will need to be able to provide developers with access to infrastructure resources for testing purposes on demand. Otherwise, developers will simply opt to continue writing code, even though many of the dependencies on which that code depends has not been tested.
Application testing, regardless of era, regularly gets the short shrift. Developers are almost always falling behind schedule. One of the easiest ways to make up for lost ground is to reduce the amount of time allocated to testing. Some developers even believe agile development methodologies enable them to respond fast enough to any flaw by delivering additional updates—many of which don’t get tested either, because of a lack of time. End users, however, are becoming less forgiving when it comes to application experiences. If an application doesn’t perform as expected the first time, customers are less apt to give that application a second chance, much less a third or a fourth.
Because of that reality, in many organizations there’s more focus than ever on application testing. The challenge is not necessarily creating or running the test, but rather, how best to manage the overall process end to end.
— Mike Vizard
