DEV Community: Hamidakhtar56

Importance Of Semantic HTML In Modern Web Development

Hamidakhtar56 — Fri, 14 Oct 2022 10:46:15 +0000

When your HTML code starts interacting with the browser, the tags which have specific information on what to do and how to do are called HTML semantic tags. As a developer, you are an advocate of the code you plan to write. I have often observed that fast releases in agile, make developers forget the importance of Semantic HTML, as they hasten their delivery process on shorter deadlines. This is my attempt to help you recollect all the vital benefits brought by Semantic HTML in today’s modern web development.

Which are the most wanted automation testing tools that have climbed the top of the ladder so far? Let’s take a look.

Starting Of With Basics!

< p > is semantic tag as the content wrapped within the element is known as a paragraph. While < div > and < span > are simply containers without holding any meaning for the content they display. However, both have potential as they have the ability to give targeted styles to containers while building a website.

< Div > is used for styling purposes and lack the semantic value.

A div is a container and also a division in the document. < Div > element works in conjunction with the stylesheet. It is a block-level element that helps to build the layout of a web page. On the other hand, span targets the smaller grouping of text and is an inline-level element. < div > and < span > when combined with class or id attributes can create purposeful styles. For the longest time, we used these divisions and styles to build the structure of our web page. But this division was not providing any semantic value.

Semantic tags are discovered to give correct interpretation of the content. For example, < img >, < h1 >, < h2 >, < header >, < footer >, < section >, < aside >, < article > tags. These tags are giving the idea about the type of content. Semantic mark-up defines the structure based on the importance of the content. Appearance of a web page has to be controlled by CSS. You have to have command over these two practices to enhance searchability, accessibility, interoperability, and cross browser compatibility.

Below mentioned are the Semantic tags in HTML:

TAG NAME	TAG
First-level headline	< h1 >
Second-level headline	< h2 >
Third-level headline	< h3 >
Fourth-level headline	< h4 >
Fifth-level headline	< h5 >
Sixth-level headline	< h6 >
Generic inline style container	< span >
Teletype text	< tt >
Abbreviation	< abbr >
Acronym	< acronym >
Long quotation	< blockquote >
Definition	< dfn >
Address for author(s) of the document	< address >
Text to be entered by the user	< kbd >
Sample output	< samp >
Subscript	< sub >
Superscript	< sup >
Citation	< cite >
Code reference	< code >
Logical division	< div >
Deleted text	< del >
Inserted text	< ins >
Emphasis	< em >
Strong emphasis	< strong >
Thematic break	< hr >
Pre-formatted text	< pre >
Short inline quotation	< q >
Variable or user defined text	< var >
Table	< table >
Video	< video >
Audio	< audio >
Blockquote	< blockquote >
Canvas	< canvas >
Article	< article >
Aside	< aside >
Details	< details >
Figcaption	< figcaption >
Figure	< figure >
Footer	< footer >
Header	< header >
Main	< main >
Mark	< mark >
Nav	< nav >
Section	< section >
Summary	< summary >
Time	< time >

It is overwhelming to choose a semantic element from a list of about 100 semantic elements. Here is the list of few elements that would be helpful if you are overthinking about how to choose from.

Structure:
Header, h1, h2, h3, nav, footer, article, section

Text:
P, ul, ol, li, blockquote

Inline:
A, strong, em, q, abbr, small

Focus on the significance of aforementioned tags, they deliver the value and meaning to a page. They accommodate the general purpose and don’t concern into how a page looks.

Clients quest a site which has a potential to jump all the barriers and reach their visitors immensely. As a web developer, you must build a wall between content and presentation.

“The power of the Web is in its universality.
Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.“
-Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web

Header is at the top of the page and you can use more than one header element for a page. The header element may include navigation besides introductory text or heading. Never confuse the < header > tag with < head > element. It is from < h1 > to < h6 >. < h1 > through < h6 > gives you a multiple level of text headings.

Every element has different semantic meaning and should be used accordingly:

The < header > element, which falls within the body element outlines the heading of a web page. The role of < head > element is only to outline metadata, to represent the title of the page, and here you can give links to external files. It is directly under < html > element.
You might want to reuse your content or independently distribute it, the < article > element is the choice for self-contained content. You can mark-up blog posts, user-submitted content, newspaper, articles etc. The content of the article always makes sense even if you transfer the content, for example, within a printed work or an email.
< Section > elements usually used with a heading and represent a thematic grouping. Section element means a generic document with a heading e.g. tabbed page or sections of a thesis. A home page can be divided into sections for news information or contact item.
< aside > element consists of tangentially related content to the surrounding content e.g. sidebars in printed typography. Here are 19 typography tips for engaging web design.

To come closer to a natural language, each element uses the word to make sense in distribution of content. Although, the text displayed will not represent any change — “the practice of semantic tags gives more sense to content”. In addition, you find yourself orientated when a project starts growing with more and more lines of code.

As a programmer, you have to encounter with thousands of lines. In the screenshot given above, semantic code is easier to read and understand. Another advantage of using semantic elements is they also cover assistive technologies and search engines.

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Importance Of Semantic HTML In SEO

Over the years, Importance of semantic HTML evolved dramatically in SEO to fulfill Google’s mission. Along with all SEO tips and tricks, content should be equipped with correct tags maintaining a clear hierarchy and architecture.

As crawlers need to distinguish between different types of data, semantic tags tell what type of information is on a web page and the importance attached to every tag can be used explicitly.

While plotting a semantic mark-up, your effort is both computer and human readable. Computers will analyse the content to index and deliver it. Earlier versions of HTML didn’t define globally accepted names such as header, article or footer. Advent of HTML5 introduced many new semantic elements.

Semantic Tags before and after — HTML5

Google and Opera analysed the frequent use of non-semantic elements to create new semantic tags. Examples of such semantic tags included in HTML5 are: nav, footer, article, header, and aside. Prior to this, they looked like: < div id=”header” >, < div id=”footer” >, and < div id=”nav” >.

It is a well-known fact that Google and other search engines have introduced HTML5 semantic tags into their algorithm. Placement of keywords in HTML hierarchy makes an impact as the search engines weigh the keywords according to the hierarchy. That means < h1 > keyword is more important than the < p > keyword. Meaningful content in a logical hierarchy can easily rank your page higher.
SEO is a bundle of small details, and HTML meaningful tagging is one of them. Structured data is in the schema of Google to provide extra value to users in SERPs. Insert most important keywords in a higher hierarchy to let the search engine know about the page and attract the audience of your concern.

Not only the context, but semantic tags prioritize the sections of content. SEO highlights the importance of semantic HTML as the semantic markup makes a right path for the content to reach the target audience. It is important for Google and Bing to receive explicit instruction and prioritize the content. They don’t have any visual clue. Only the way to understand important content is to communicate with header, menu, and other semantic tags.

< h1 > tag is the most important tag in terms of displaying the generalized description of an HTML page. It is recommended to use once per your HTML document. It should occupy a wording which covers the central topic of your content such as long and descriptive product name. You can find some good examples on Amazon.com while searching for a T-shirt, shoe or a mobile device.

This is the reason why sometimes sellers try to accommodate many keywords into the product name. They actually try to boost their search engine ranking through < h1 > element.

Majority of information is conveyed through text in web world. And if you have stapled sensible tags; it is going to add value. You will easily reach the audience of your choice.

Importance Of Semantic HTML In Accessibility

Accessibility is the foremost thought and foundation of a project in a web development process. Apart from older browsers or cross compatibility, it is developer’s obligation to build it navigable via keyboard. Along with the learning of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, accessibility is an important term that not applies to a particular section of society but indeed to all of us.

Are you really interested to create something which is not accessible to someone?

Different formats utilize the web content in a different manner. Information presented has to survive with its meaning while being transformed on different devices and assistive tools. Web content needs to retain its meaning on any sort of technology which people might be using to understand a project. A well-crafted HTML content is shoved to an accessibility API by a browser. The API will translate the page information to an audible speech, or by a Braille reader to Braille.

A semantically correct HTML tells the browsers how content is interrelated and allow the assistive technology do their job by converting the provided information into a format a user seeks. If a software gets a non-semantic HTML, it will not help assistive technology to produce a positive output. JAWS or NVDA can use the headings of a page to scroll up to the information people want.
Screen readers also allow the user to navigate data tables that means a user can access a row at a time.

Visitors use the visual cues and navigate the site; in a non-linear fashion. Semantic tags allow the screen reader users to jump or switch the content through heading, links, paragraph, or lists tags.

Divs and spans don’t allow readers to jump and index the content. Navigating a semantic HTML is pretty easy as screen readers read each element while progressing, and making you notify you are on which element. Many screen readers allow the headings to switch from next to previous or vice versa. They also make the content handy by listing all the headings at one place.

< Div > and < span > lack the keyboard or touch support, means they cannot communicate the information to accessibility API. It is not worth using div or span for a button element. And the choice is semantically meaningful HTML button element. Assistive Technology is dependent on semantic HTML elements to know the functional purpose of your content. It has to fit a criterion in which everyone gets the information. It gives a choice to users who can perceive the same page differently.

The content is more than the visual presentation. Great content requires a proper semantic markup to bury all the accessibility issues such as — if you have made a mistake in building a table or do you know the use of sup element?

< table > elements are always overused to create a layout which is not the best practice. Tables should be used to present tabular data, rather than creating columns in your web page. Categorically, tabular data is statistics distances, time tables etc. Developers are often confused when to use a table and a bit surprising is when one doesn’t incorporate an ordered or unordered list for listing the data.
Don’t even replace the overused tables with div elements. It is another bad practice instead. Div elements do not contribute anything while giving meaning to your content, they are just containers. Use of < div > in place of tables, fieldsets — and labels used for visual styles in case of forms — invalid markup on tabs, links, buttons, menus — extra < p > tags added to create white spaces contribute to a bad semantic markup and thus accessibility pitfalls.

Importance Of Semantic HTML In Cross Browser Compatibility

Browsers interact with semantic elements with their own style and behaviours. As a web developer, you may have figured out what is “Valid XHTML” and “Valid CSS”. It points to accessibility and web standards. W3.org always remains at the forefront of validation. The site will emphasize you about the semantic markup to ensure cross browser accessibility and cross browser compatibility. It is important to utilize web standards in your web designs. Browser compatibility testing ensures easy access to a disabled person and makes the website more identical in different browsers. In essence, the final result is better and more effective.

If you find the process of cross browser testing to be time-consuming and intimidating, infeasible then the user can have ugly experiences on different versions and browsers, finally giving a never to return experience. Validation is always important for an aesthetical work. Google Chrome has a huge market, but you also need to include Opera, Safari, Firefox, and many less popular browsers to sell a product and reach the target audience. It is highly recommended to perform cross browser testing of your website in different browsers to ensure cross browser compatibility. Using external stylesheet, HTML Tidy and CSSTidy ensure best optimization. W3C provides the best validation services to validate your markup and CSS.

Several new elements in HTML5 are block-level elements, that means that HTML5 compliant browsers will use the block style by default. While using these elements in an older browser, you need to reinforce the style manually. Every browser uses a master list of HTML elements and if the element is not in the list, it is an unknown element.

< article > element will behave differently in IE8, nor a red border will appear around it because styles rules are not followed prior to IE9. You can use a dummy article element constructed through JavaScript to sort out the problem.

As a developer, you need to consume a lot of time in understanding the history of browsers so that you can successfully build a cross browser compatible web-app. You need to devise a strategy for progressive enhancement & cross browser compatibility. Among so many versions and browsers, can you claim you are heading to build something which will work perfectly on all machines between, Chrome, Safari, Opera, Firefox, and Internet Explorer? Other than the one or two versions which are regularly browsed, users have a humongous list with older browsers and devices with different capabilities which can fail to understand your efforts eventually. Apart from keeping your code simple, CSS reset, valid Doctype, conditional comments for different browsers, you need to make a sensible choice in case of cross browser testing. Here is a complete guide on creating browser compatible HTML & CSS.

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LambdaTest — A Cross Browser Testing Platform

Browser compatibility testing is quite scary to any testing team if not provided with a suite of services and a clear mind map. LambdaTest provides you with a cloud-based platform to perform manual and automated cross browser testing on more than 3000+ real browsers and browser versions. You can perform automated screenshot testing, and responsive testing as well. LambdaTest offers a Selenium Grid to help you run automation test scripts in parallel. With integrations to multiple 3rd party tools for bug tracking such as JIRA, asana, slack etc. & CI/CD tools to fully automate your delivery pipeline such as Jenkins, CircleCI, Travis CI etc. Don’t forget to check all LambdaTest integrations! Ensures your website works as intended when accessed through different browsers before you push it live in the market for your customers. Wanna know the best part? You can get a lifetime free access where your consumption limit gets renewed by a simple sign up. LambdaTest also offers 24×7 customer chat support, to help you with any issues, questions, or suggestions around cross browser testing on their platform.

Key Considerations Before Writing Semantic HTML

Now, that we realize the importance of Semantic HTML in web design. Let us quickly evaluate some best practices to keep in mind before you start writing your Semantic HTML.

Avoid the use of tables for layout.
Validate HTML precisely.
Semantic elements have intended meaning and should be used accordingly.
Use semantic class names and id values.
Always try to complete the job with limited elements.
h1-h6 for heading — to create a logical outline for your document.
Practice table for tabular data with a full set of features.
For quote, use blockquote or q.
While using images, don’t skip title and alt attributes.

Widespread use of semantic elements is more important than using the POSH (Plain Old Semantic HTML), despite the fact POSH is easier and quicker. As discussed so far, we realize the key benefits from Semantic HTML:

Semantics elements support the accessibility. The audience can visit a page and access it in an environment and without the use of CSS.
Visually impaired users can access the site with a screen reader.
It will increase your search engine ranking by putting weight to different parts of the document.
Developers find ease to maintain the code and can create a wall between presentation (CSS) and content (HTML). So, less coding without cluttered tags, which will further process the page faster to load. In overall experience, the page will look amazing on any kind of device.

To Sum It Up!

Undoubtedly semantic HTML has become the cornerstone of web development. When you are not clear-cut which element should be used for a piece of content, it is recommended to choose one and maintain its consistency across the site. Some of the elements such as font, centre, and big are obsolete now and they are usurped by CSS. Following the same pattern, presentational attributes have also been removed; for example, bgcolor on table, or background on body.

Video or audio has children tags; source and track with no closing tags. Source element can point to a different source file: WebM, MP4, Ogg Theora. Browsers select one depending on how they deal with a particular source file. Firefox, Chrome and Opera will choose the Ogg version while Safari or IE will use the Mp3 version. Browsers communicate with a source file that they understand. IE 6–8 are older browsers and use Flash Player to run the video. Modern browsers users can experience the native-video on a website.

Using < b > and < strong > present the same visual styling but own different semantic meaning. Among both of them, strong element has strong importance and b should be used only as a styling hook to change the look of the element. Strong element represents the significance of an element. Semantic elements will reinforce the meaning and significance of the content within the tags.

Developers are stagnant over < div > and < span >. They have control over styles and behaviors and can avoid the CSS reset. It seems like a benefit but the greater advantage lies in the use of semantic elements. You need not implement SPACE and ENTER keyboard functionality while you are using semantic tags unlike < div >, < span >, and < a >. Someone using assistive technology will identify the div and span as plain text whereas < a > as links. On the surface, incorrectly used HTML may seem harmless but underneath, it leads to poor accessibility, poor cross browser compatibility, fuzzy user experience & customer engagement, higher bounce rate, fall in Google SERP.

At last, even if we do keep in mind all the basics and best practices of Semantic HTML in mind. There is no telling, if your code renders seamlessly across your audience through different browsers. A quick cross browser compatibility testing can boost your confidence and delivery a long way, and with LambdaTest, you can get started for free! Happy Testing. 🙂

The Why & How To Create A Front-End Website Testing Plan

Hamidakhtar56 — Thu, 13 Oct 2022 10:11:20 +0000

Undoubtedly, weak testing phase is going to impact SDLC — and clients may change the perception and place lesser importance in future services. With all the constraints, you need to worry about company reputation. If you want to foster growth, you need to uphold principles, find out and innovate plans methodically.

Sign-off from the client is not the end of the journey, if something happens down the line, even at a later stage, when your product has reached the end users, certainly you are going to hear the repercussion of an endless echo.

For an authentic front-end testing plan for a website, functionality and performance have to be checked on different devices and browsers (with multiple versions). The process of evaluating your website over different browsers, browser versions, and operating systems is called cross browser testing & is considered a vital part of every front-end website testing plan for having an estimate on the audience you are able to please with a seamless UI & UX. A master front-end testing plan should incorporate precautions required to reduce time, effort, and money.

Why You Must Execute Front-End Testing?

Here, I will draw some highlight on the necessity of front-end testing.

Frameworks Introduced Complexity

In the past, developers observed a shift with the evolution of frameworks like React and Angular which also introduced complexity. Javascript swiftly reached the top. Although gaining momentum across different applications, there are so many libraries and frameworks to wrap your head around.

Along with it, client-side development coupled with browsers might experience unexpected result due to modifications in rendering engines of browsers. Leading to browser compatibility issues & an unpleasant user journey. Therefore, front-end testing plan comes as a necessity for making sure that your website renders the same across different browsers. Performing browser compatibility testing can help you with that area.

Which are the most wanted automation testing tools that have climbed the top of the ladder so far? Let’s take a look!

3rd Party Services

Front-end optimizations face challenges when you rely on 3rd party services, especially when you run ad networks. Integrated via javascript, these services with a poor performing script forces you to lose your control over the website. With the increasing popularity of Software as a Service (SaaS), you are bound to deal with 3rd party services and encounter challenges that will happen to arise during a project life cycle. Thus, it becomes indispensable to devise a front-end testing plan based on the 3rd party applications you are planning to integrate with for rendering your website.

Internet — An Unforgiving Place

The internet has become an unforgiving place and kids and seniors are also on board. Various countries are giving free Wi-Fi spots across many places where people can access the net without any username and password. That means even a single subtle error on a front end is going to be noticed & may affect your branding in a manner far worse than you can imagine. Even a small typo error could end up being trolled back at your organization. Especially, if you are in a competitive market then your competitors will keep an eye out on your product. There is a good chance they may notice your flaws before others do! So to perform website front-end testing becomes a vital task, where you can’t afford to turn a blind eye towards any aspect.

How Do We Plan A Front-end Testing Plan?

I am sure by far, we realize the relevance of devising a well organized front-end testing that covers all your website has to offer on UI & UX. Now, the next major question that arises is How? How can you create an excellent front-end testing plan?

Don’t worry, I will be addressing all the key points to keep in mind for developing a master front-end testing plan. But before we do that, we need to understand the major pain points to consider.

Time & Budget, Usually Both Hinder The Testing Process

Designers and developers converge together to turn a design into reality via code. But what is the point if it isn’t presented well in front of your website visitors? I have seen it very often in agile that teams are more focused on deploying the next update, paying less attention to what they already have due to narrow time windows. Time can be a major constraint for executing front-end testing plan because there is a lot that you need to cover.

Front-end testing or graphical user interface testing must ensure you are using a defect-free
updated front-end. Would you make a number entry in name field? A bundle of small issues in browsers can trip your reputation off. That is why a strong front-end testing plan should be made considering different individual skills possessed by your teammates.

All the “reasons responsible for high severity or critical defects” identified at early stages: design phases or requirement gathering, will prevent future obstacles in a front-end testing plan of a website such as:

Eventually testing process being extended at last.
Missing of deadlines.
Dropping the idea or removing an important feature due to an aggregation of defects in an unprecedented manner.
The situation going out of control in highly limited time.

For instance, let’s consider performing cross browser testing. You have a perfectly developed website but you are targeting a global audience and people visiting your website can be from any browser or any desktop or mobile device. Now, the aesthetic design is going to encounter an innumerable combination of OS and browsers. Evaluating your website over hundreds or maybe thousands of browsers could be very tricky, strenuous, and time-consuming.

In such cases, you could go for device labs that will allocate you real devices to test your website at, but most people won’t find it affordable. The other option is to go for simulator & emulators to create your own virtual testing environment. However, that would require a considerable amount of effort in setting hundreds of browser + OS combinations. Fortunately, we have the power of cloud, and there are cloud-based cross browser testing tools such as LambdaTest which could help you test your website on over 3000+ browsers, & browser versions without any setup on your local machine.

Preparing Checklist For A Front-End Testing Plan

For a Front-end website development, a checklist incorporated during the construction phase cease all burnouts at later stages — and make the end result more sustainable and stable.

Team cohesion and a sense of belonging can kill the wastage of time at the initial level. That means that: the door of testing opens from the very first phase of development.

Front-end testing plan checklist will help starters or seniors to analyse, understand, and maintain a basic set of guidelines and ensuring web product’s quality from the very beginning till the very end. Enlisted information will help a designer as well as a developer.

To check the validity of the document, visit the W3C’s validation service. One of the peers could have missed closing a < div > tag. Validation is an inevitable process. It should avoid a lot of back and forth during a testing process.
The first thing declaration is responsible for a cleanly rendered website. It triggers a standard rendering mode by giving instruction to browser about the version of markup language. In an HTML document, it should be the very first thing, and if not included, the browser may assume a different language and causing to render incorrectly.

No CSS Reset: Yahoo and Eric Meyer are actively using CSS Reset stylesheet which is used to maintain consistency across the browser. Skipping CSS reset reinforces you to declare much more if you don’t want browsers to show things differently. Commonly used CSS reset:

Normalize.css
HTML5Reset
Eric Meyers CSS Reset

You’ll use IDs and they must be “unique, easy, and intelligent”!
Do you have SEO in mind? Search Engine Optimization is very critical to help your website Google SERP(Search Engine Result Pages). You may not have spent enough attention on best practices around SEO, keep up with new rules, understanding good content, keywords, image alt tags, meta-data, site map, intelligent backlinking, elimination of duplicate content, load times, and suitable crawlable site architecture. Are your using Semantic HTML & RWD(Responsive Web Design) to help your website load faster and better on mobile devices. If you are not, then be ready to experience a downside on the SEO front.
In case you are looking for a free next-gen browser to build, test & debug mobile websites you can try LT Browser a dev-friendly browser where you can see the mobile view of your website on Android and iOS resolutions & check its responsiveness.
Visual interfaces for desktop, mobile, and browsers definitely create a buzz among web professionals. As a best practice, you must always begin with a mobile layout, and only then should you move up to the desktop layout.
Try to collect all time-saving techniques one of them is version control that helps you to maintain code modification record . Commonly used version control systems are GIT and SVN.
CSS at the top of the HTML document’s header — improves progressive enhancement & cross browser compatibility, and blocks a glimpse(bug) of unstyled text.
It is important to practice where and how to add your scripts to improve and influence the loading time. Browser constructs DOM and CSSOM by fetching HTML and CSS respectively. You would not like the browser to wait till JavaScript gets resolved. So put the scripts at bottom (before closing the body tag). Use “defer and async” in HTML attributes to allow downloading of scripts asynchronously. In practice generally, use defer. “defer” allows execution right after DOM is built whereas “async” gets executed in causal order(when available). “defer” follows the order in which scripts are defined in the script.

External CSS and Javascript result in faster pages as they get cached by the browser.

Minification reduces the file size by removing unnecessary characters. Minification improves the response time and removes the following items:

Whitespace characters
Comments
Line breaks
Block delimiters

CDN(Content Delivery Network) can significantly improve performance and provide fast delivery of your content across the globe. Automatically site’s files get compressed including HTML pages, stylesheets, javascript files, videos, and images. An exemplary method of caching continues to grow with the majority of web traffic.

Are you using unobtrusive JavaScript? Will, that detect the latest browser? Older browsers can’t compete as the latest browsers have some awesome features. That’s why it is recommended to detect features rather than browser detection.
if (browser === “the-one-they-make-you-use-at-work”)
{ getTheOldExperience();}else { showOffLatestFeatures();}
Developer relies on a local network environment. The scenario will change when a user starts downloading a 17MB page over 3G Connection. It is necessary to optimize bandwidth usage with slight important tricks. As a professional, inculcate habits such as Minification, Server Side HTTP Compression, and optimization of image sizes.
Web font optimization plays an important role in overall performance technique. Learning the exact techniques: how optimized fonts can reduce page size and improve rendering time? will give you extra advantages such as extra compression, legibility, accessibility, readability, and well-crafted branding. Keep in mind, until your render tree is entirely constructed, your font requests will be put on hold. Font-display property: provides the hook to download font as soon as possible. Use a web font service such as Fonts.com, Typekit, Google Fonts, and Webtype.
In addition to writing code, you are supposed to run test suites that will handle repetitive, mundane work in the background so that you may focus on the application building. Some of them are enlisted here:

npm
Grunt
Gulp
Bower
Yeoman

Keeping the above points in your checklist for a front-end testing plan will help you bring a robust and fantastic website in front of your customers. However, checklist on its own won’t be enough to draw out all you need from a successful front-end testing plan. Next up, comes targeting your audience & making sure your UI is relevant to them.

This certification is for anyone who wants to stay ahead among professionals who are growing their career in Selenium automation testing.

Here’s a short glimpse of the Selenium 101 certification from LambdaTest:

You Can’t Sell Your Product To Everyone!

You can’t sell a single product from your website to every visitor. If you sell washing machines, then a buy who is interested in buying Sofas won’t be the ideal target for you. So targeting your audience, plays a very vital role in front-end of your website. Is your UI offering the right information about what you are selling with respect to the target audience?

Critically think about the devices your audience might be using. Don’t cast a wide net, rather try to understand a combination of browsers and operating systems.

Qualitative research can distinguish your audience: whether users are tech-savvy millennials or baby boomers. Make a call here once you know their devices and demographics. Use web analytics to understand your target audience better.

Google Analytics is at the top of the hill to know the clear visibility of the browsers and devices being used by the audience of the same domain.

Find Out Which Browsers Are Most Important For Your Cross Browser Testing?

If you are targeting your audience correctly, and keeping the website ready with the right content and features that your audience seeks will help you with better CTR & conversions on your website. Targeting is key to every front-end testing plan.

This Cypress automation testing tutorial will help you learn the benefits of Cypress automation, and how to install Cypress and execute Cypress automation testing over scores of browsers and operating systems online.

Be Mobile-Ready For A Successful Front-End Testing Plan!

In the current scenario, mobile device testing is ubiquitous. As anything good in shape on desktop might not look elegant on mobiles. Testing environment should encompass a selection of devices. Experience is different while you scroll or roll over your fingers on mobile. And sometimes, it can pose a difficulty. Maintaining the same accuracy as with desktop: when you have to pair a search box with touch keypad — will require some additional effort — and need to stop user reluctance here!

The mobile world is fragmented into brands, models, resolution, and different screen sizes. Apart from all the facts, notifications, phone calls, or other interruptions such as popups and alerts have to be tweaked for uninterrupted functionality.

iOS and Android are the most popular mobile OS. By testing your application for them, you cover an important baseline in any kind of market. You can’t expect everyone to update OS when new versions pop out in the market. So keeping the oldest versions in mind during a testing phase will enlarge the testing ambit.

We are living in a world where the number of mobile users to access the internet are on a constant rise every year. If you want to excel with a front-end testing plan then it is only natural to consider mobile rendering in high priority before launching a website or pushing a code change.

Check Out How To Leverage LambdaTest For Testing A Mobile Website!

Keep In Mind The Different Types Of Testing!

There are several types of testing that are considered necessary for every front-end testing plan. Let’s have a brief look at each of them.

Unit Testing

While fixing a bug or adding a little feature, other parts of software might stop working. To deal with such kind of scenario, unit testing separates the section of the code to check its accuracy in isolation. Usually, developers take the initiative to perform unit testing. For a developer, it is necessary to take iterative steps of testing and coding in parallel — and depending on the requirements. Skipping or minimal unit testing can lead to a higher cost incurred in fixing the defects. Javascript unit testing includes organized number of tests in a suite which doesn’t conflict with each other, and have fewer dependencies on each other. “Unable to load alien.js” such kind of error will fall under the Javascript Unit Testing.

End-to-End Testing

End-to-end testing covers the flow of your application from start to finish. End-to-tests trace the user journey such as opening the browser, navigating, and experiences a complete production-like scenario. End-to-end testing validates interconnected systems along with the software system. It includes a complete front-end and back-end system. You can use the end-to-end test for your javascript application, for example, TestCafe.

Integration Testing

The purpose of integration testing involves modules/components are functioning as expected. Integration testing technique is applied to a large application in which many modules are tightly coupled with each other. Modules are individually tested and once integrated, a combinational behavior is validated. It is conducted with development parallelly.In integration testing, you require more logical skills as some of the modules might not be ready or under construction during the time of testing. Test stubs and drivers are used when integrated. Integration testing will analyze whether the logic implemented by developers follow the prescribed standard. As a developer, you might change the structure of data in one module that needs to be taken care of in later modules. It is important to see the response when modules interact with the third-party API. When a developer skips the unit testing, integration testing becomes inevitable.

LambdaTest

LambdaTest breaks conglomerate by providing online browser compatibility testing tool. You can perform manual cross browser testing, responsive testing, bulk screenshot testing for UI regression comparison. You could even perform test automation, by running multiple test cases in parallel. LambdaTest provides you with more than 3000 real browsers, along with in-build image editor, video recorder, and multiple 3rd party integrations with JIRA, asana, Trello, etc. to help you highlight and logs bugs in a jiffy. You could also integrate with multiple CI/CD tools such as Jenkins, Travis CI, CircleCI, and more, to facilitate a robust and faster delivery pipeline as you perform cross browser testing on cloud.

Functional Testing

Functional tests are automated tests, sometimes they are also called as E2E testing or browser testing. Functional tests are implemented to ensure an application is doing the same thing what it is supposed to do. Complete functionality is checked by feeding input; like clicking around the pages. Functionality testing is done to check the entire application, from front end to back end database, incorporating hardware and networking infrastructure. It includes machines and components, thus it is also a form of integration testing. The prime goal of functional testing is to test the main functions of your application. It should ensure: users are at ease while navigating screens of the application. It will also check the accessibility.

Visual/UI Testing

Visual/UI testing includes validation of screenshots. It is a quality assurance activity to ensure screen looks the same as it is expected to be on any devices, screen resolution, browsers, operating systems. Comparing the result of rendered version through different screenshots captured within a headless browser, visual regression testing allow you to detect deviations.

Find out Visual UI Regression Bugs using Smart Testing at LambdaTest!

While building up your application, things get overloaded and complex, the situation is prone to breaking existing functionality and introducing new bugs — unit, behavior, and integration testing will come in place to make the application stable.

In Headless testing, you can run the tests in browser UI without the head. It is especially useful in a CI environment. Eliminating the extra overhead of GUI, Headless testing allows you to run tests more quickly and you have lightweight-scripted automation. Headless testing tool: PhantomJS, Nightmare, Headless Chrome, Puppeteer.

Performance/Stress Testing

Performance Testing is a non-functional technique that checks system parameters such as stability, responsiveness, speed, reliability, and resource usage of software under the various workload.

Subsets Of Performance Testing :

Load testing: It measures the critical transactions over a period of time. Heavy load volumes on the database, server, and application can be monitored through Load testing. Load testing will help to understand the volume of user interactions your system can grasp comfortably under different scenarios.
Stress testing: An application is overloaded to check for unexpected behaviour and know its withstanding capacity.

A website can miserably fail to handle 10000+ users during a festive season. Due to poor performance, the company can lose billions because most of the users might abandon the website after 3 seconds. Even 1-second delay causes a 7% reduction in a sale. Consequently, you can expect a loss of $2.5 million for an e-commerce company in a year.

Accessibility Testing

All functionality has to be defined such as keyboard equivalents for mouse operations.
Users can move through elements. Keyboard shortcuts are available for menus and can be turned off or remapped.
The application should support all operating systems.
The application incorporates alternatives for time-based media. Alternatives for pre-recorded audio, video content. Captions for pre-recorded audio, live audio have to be in sync.
User has flexibility for audio and video control adjusts.
Colors should be flexible for all users, that means the content is easily readable and is not used as a visual means of conveying any message. User can enlarge the test upto 200% without the screen magnifiers.
All the labels should be properly written.

Here are the most wanted automated testing tools that have climbed the top of the ladder so far. Let’s take a look

Key Tools & Frameworks!

Here I will be highlighting some of the most renowned tools & frameworks used for front-end testing.

Wraith*:* Wraith: It is quite simple to work while comparing two different URLs. If you are familiar with Ruby, installation is also not that much complex. Allow you to take a screenshot of components by pairing with casperjs, and especially good if the website depends on third-party components. Place all the config options in config.yaml such as diff mode, fuzz amount, screen widths, threshold, and headless browser.

PhantomCSS saves the screenshot as the baseline image, has become popular among front-end developers as you can compare baseline images with future tests images. If both the screenshots match, the test will pass.

Gemini: An appealing utility tool for regression testing to help spot our the differences between visual appearance of multiple web pages on your website. It provides test suites to organise your code. In a cross-browser compatibility testing plan, it works with Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, IE8+, and Opera 12+. Gemini can integrate with Selenium without direct access.

Selenium: For developers and testers, Selenium is a household name and an open source automation tool to check user behavior. Selenium consists of Selenium RC, Selenium IDE, Selenium Grid, Selenium Webdriver. Selenium offers bindings to support various major programming languages i.e. Java, C#, Perl, Python, PHP, and Ruby. It saves enormous time by doing the simultaneous running of tests. Thus, you can do multiple testing supported on different browsers (Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari) and platforms like Windows, Linux, and Mac. Being an industry standard, Selenium allows you to write tests in languages like PHP, Groovy, Python, Java, C#, etc. The automation tool offers playback and record features to build automation tests.

WebdriverCSS: WebDriver is another one the renowned regression tools for UI testing. It helps in image processing & hooks into Selenium. You can use WebdriverIO to write your E2E tests. You can send several commands to the browser before and after taking screenshots. WebdriverCSS integrates with Jasmine, Mocha, and Cucumber.js

Spectre: Spectre is a web application which does not run test and instead focuses on screenshots difference. In normal use, you can pair it with WebdriverIO or PhantomJS. Here, Spectre will manage the processing of images whereas later captures images. You can run Spectre natively or use the docker.

Percy: Percy is easy to set up, can integrate with CI environment. Integrate Percy with your tests and CI environment to allow it to receive and render snapshots. Percy comes with free and paid plans to catch bugs and get an insight into UI changes.

Linters

Linting tools come in place to check the quality of code & play a vital role for any front-end testing plan. The linting tools ensure durability, robustness, portability, and maintainability of code. Code checking process flags the potential bugs with the help of techniques that allow checking of code without actually being executed. In different scenarios, you can use the linting, either when you are writing the code, saving your file, making some changes, or before the code goes into production. Linting should be done on a regular basis as it will make your life as a coder easy!

Linters came in existence to deal with the problematic code patterns and can be extended with custom rules, should you need to add few or more custom conventions in a project for one reason or another.

It is difficult to do manual testing and be so attentive, especially when codebase extends on a daily basis. eLinting tools find code errors in a few seconds.

CSSLint: Leading the market of CSS linting, comes with a lot of configurable options. You have choices on the kind of errors and warnings you are going to test and will validate CSS against all the rules you check in.

SublimeLinter CSSLint: Install CSSLint before installing SublimeLinter CSSLint plugin. Either, use the default setting or you need to configure settings once. After that, access notifications and warnings inside Sublime Text editor.

Javascript Linting parses and checks if any syntax is violating the rule. If a violation occurs, a warning is shown explaining unexpected behavior. Use the online version for small projects: JSLint, ESLint or JSHint. For larger projects, it is recommended to use a task runner like Gulp or Grunt. Linters ensure developers are following the best practices as a result of which few bugs appear during project development.

JavaScript Unit Testing Frameworks

Jasmine
Mocha
Karma
AVA
Protractor

Don’t miss out on Top 11 JavaScript Frameworks !

Top Performance Testing Tools

LoadRunner
WebLOAD
NeoLoad
Apache JMeter
OpenSTA
LoadUI
LoadImpact
Rational Performance Tester
Testing Anywhere
Loadstorm

Stress Testing recommended tool

Neo load
LoadTracer

Front-End Performance Tools

Page Speed: Analyze and optimize with open source add on Page Speed. The tool evaluates the loading time and offers the suggestion to minimize it. Web page retrieval becomes quicker on Google Search Engine.

YSlow: YSlow checks all the components that also included components of javascript. It gives suggestions about the web components.

PageSpeed Insights: Page Speed analyzes performance and content of the web page and gives you a score index and suggestions on how a website can load the page faster. You can set up tool within your gulp project to receive a score in your terminal and allowing you to check the site without the live server.

That Was All!

Well, I believe that should do it. Keeping everything in mind that we have discussed so far, I believe you will be able to come up with a neatly organized front-end testing plan. The tools & frameworks discussed in this article are subjective. Let me know which tool helps you fast track your front-end testing plan.

Remember, maintaining a quality front-end testing plan for website will increase productivity and increase clients reliance on your services. It is important to understand trending general patterns merged with the experience of experts to define a quality test suit. Tools make life easy for a developer as well as a tester, whichever aforementioned tool you pick, stick and put efforts in it. Things will start to flourish with the development of an amazing place to work.

How Professional QA Implements A Robust CI/CD Pipeline?

Hamidakhtar56 — Thu, 06 Oct 2022 11:41:25 +0000

The obsolete conventional methods of software developments were not taking over the escalated market trends, and those methods lacked solutions for the increased demand of quick software release that introduced the “Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD)”. Along with CI/CD, you need to have that kind of technical capability where developers adapt to the shortened delivery cycles and automation processes. Keeping up with the acceleration of change in the testing world, you need to deepen, broaden, and make a strong network with other QA professionals also. Easier said than done, I know! I have often observed the struggle involved in implementing a CI/CD pipeline release cycles, improper resource management, unrealistic ETAs, hesitation involved in task management from a QA manager point of view. Which is why, I intend to talk about the rise of CI/CD pipeline, common challenges, and actionable insights every QA should follow, to cruise swiftly & safely through every release using a CI/CD pipeline.

Why CI/CD Pipeline Became An Obvious Choice To A Majority Of Organizations?

Sooner or later, by now, testers went on shifting towards Continuous Delivery in projects and organizations. The teams opted for the CI/CD pipeline to take advantage of the perceived benefits of a quick release build, that was at the push of a button. Businesses need faster feedback, consequently vastly improved time to market. This led to an increase in worldwide adoption of CI/CD pipeline. In personal experience, CI/CD pipeline left an impact on how I used to approach my testing as it helped my team to accelerate the go-to-market launch.

My developer friends had little hunger for testing approaches, especially the lengthy testing phases that were never found to keep up with the pace of delivery. Continuous Delivery becomes right up to developers’ alley when they get rapid feedback on their code. The moment they check in, they get the signal if they mistakenly introduced some kind of issues within the build pipeline comprising different layers of testing. Without even test automation, you have a tendency to know the feedback from live users — a direct connection from your customer base. Developers never cripple with fast feedback and hence enhance the production. Build pipeline reduces the waiting time expected for integration and release testing. That means that everything happens at one go: write code — test locally — review — merge — integration — and into the tester hands. One of the key parts is test automation where a company can focus on continuous integration and continuous delivery of the software. A single click can land the executable to an environment, that is local, test or production. Best practices in CI/CD pipeline can deliver the product in high quality.

Importance of CI/CD pipeline became evident with time demanding for agile, kanban and other latest SDLC approaches. But how do we as a professional QA should go about managing ourselves in a CI/CD pipeline. Let’s find out.

Rational Steps Every QA Should Note For A Successful CI/CD Pipeline

In the CI/CD pipeline, a technical part could be a trap for the testers. Basically, their duty entails more than that: all the attention to the requirement, practices, products, and processes. Should you start working in a Continuous Delivery environment — Contemplate x 10 times! Think about:

Whether the team is heading in the right direction?
If all the business requirements have transformed into executable specifications?
As a QA tester in what way you are going to contribute in terms of scenarios, acceptance criteria, and examples.
Do you think already floating processes have room for improvement? Are you able to detect the waste and remove that waste finally?
Your experience about non-functional testing, performance, accessibility, and security etc.
Cross browser testing to ensure your changes looking good to the audience who is viewing your web-application from different browsers, browser versions, devices, and operating systems.
Calculating your ROI on test automation with Selenium for automated cross browser testing.
The difference between cross browser testing & responsive testing. Both the testing practices are often misinterpreted as one & the same. However, they are not!
Version Control, being a cornerstone of CI/CD pipeline enable developers to collaborate on a shared codebase. Version control is an absolute must and a great companion of CD. You have the undo functionality in version control system means rollbacks to the previous release. In addition, configuration, databases, scripts, documentation can be tracked throughout history.
Data and configuration required across all the staging environments. Keep in mind, the 13 reasons why the staging environment is failing for your organization.
Creating automated stable tests across the entire application with test frameworks and automated tools
A deep insight: no code or feature remain untested that can further decrease in speed consequently; holding back your team to release the software at times.
A good tracking mechanism to maintain the effectiveness of the regression test suite clearly outline a process and ensuring only useful tests are added to the test suite, having a consolidated view of all the quality activities as you keep regression defects in check.
Automatic code commits, test suites, and test environment produces immediate feedback, and when you turn to CI/CD pipeline, it automatically resolves issues like version control, or when coders would write unit tests which are often found tough to turn into a workflow. Upholding the desired level is the key point of Quality assurance. QA means the inclusion of growing ideas and long-term maintenance and three important points that can be brought to the surface are: Testing, Delivery, and Optimization.
How other QA member would write test packages to run them automatically during every successive build? Maintaining them within a CI system makes the test suites more organized and easily accessible.
You need a Continuous Integration Server to monitor the main repository where you will be running the automated tests for newly submitted commits.
Specific roles of developers who would deal with merging the changes as often as possible.
Development lifecycle starts with checklists or playbooks comprising the tasks that happen to be performed manually. Later on, those tasks could move to automation with scripts and tools. With that, you ensure tasks are repeatable as a team member can run the script if the checklist needs to be run again. Moreover, you run playbook scripts consistently between environments, you increase the reliability like a script for deploying code mirror the production environment.

QA doesn’t limit itself within the fundamental aspects of the why & how to create a front-end website testing plan, in fact, it adds value to the organization. As much as you tend to optimize QA, the greater the chances of a faster product cycle increases. And with fast feedback loops, you can outpace the result.

Thorough testing plays an important and crucial role in the success of a software product. Always think twice, thrice about the test cases to automate, and to get the most out of it, start as early as possible. Starting out from day one gradually build your automated suite that can detect bugs at a much cheaper price rather that you find the same issues in later stages of your cycle. Squeezing test in at the end is a lot more problem so keep on figuring out the following:

How frequently you are going to repeat the scenario?
The length of the process.
Enlist all the recurring test cases that gets executed for multiple builds.
Check the people and resources dependencies involved and any shortfall or delay that might cause due to them.
If you are skipping the automation at any place, ensure it will not turn out to be an error-prone process.

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Most Common Challenges For Every CI/CD Pipeline

Developers devote 20–40% of dedicated time to debugging. That means, spending an increasing percentage on debugging software rather than building new features results in reverse outcome, and thus loss of productivity, uncontrolled spending, and employee churn.
Even the most thorough testing, staging, and QA process could allow slipping errors through the cracks, so always be ready to face unexpected, or disruption, and breaking the code often in CI/CD pipeline.
Engineering teams face the challenges even after the code is deployed as the cycle becomes more uncontrolled when you don’t add automation to your monitoring process. Outdated production monitoring practices often stall a CI/CD process, and an informed production error handling strategy should come in place to mitigate the associated risks.
Error-prone tasks, addressed at a time could prevent enough loss of energy like a painful chore might consume more than 20 minutes and multiply by 5 times for a week, would compound to a 100 painful minutes. So for a healthy dose, address the chore and optimize at the initial stage and thus preventing a painful time altogether. On this front, do the hardest part first that will further analyze and identify weaknesses in the organizational process. The procrastinated task is an indicator to an area of improvement so a team should pursue or keep them at the forefront to resolve it at the earliest.
Website business has nothing to do if an app is working solely on a developer’s machine. Overall business goal and empathy should be the key responsibility of each team member. CI/CD pipeline is entirely meant to ship code changes to the website for an end user’s convenience. So when you “done”, ensure the entirety of the team’s responsibility and contribution is complete.

Actionable Insights For Every QA To Implement A Robust CI/CD Pipeline

Other than the rational thought process, as a professional QA, you are responsible for every minute change that takes place in the production environment. Slacking off on any release cycle could lead to a flood of outages. Which is why it becomes imperative to keep a checklist on all the actionable insights one needs to take care of for ensuring a successful CI/CD pipeline.

Test Automation With Selenium For Automated Cross Browser Testing

Your website is the identity of your business on the internet, and it would be terrible if it starts looking weird on some browsers and devices after your recent code changes in production through CI/CD pipeline. Cross browser testing is a process to measure how well a website would fare against different rendering engines of different browsers and browser versions.
Test automation with Selenium can help pace your things up a lot faster, resulting in the faster go-to-market launch with the help of parallel testing in Selenium.

LambdaTest provides you with a cloud-based cross browser testing tool which offers a Selenium Grid of more than 3000 real browsers along with LambdaTest integration to numerous CI/CD tools such as Jenkins, Travis CI, CircleCI, and more.

Exploratory & Automation Testing

Our regular readers would know our main emphasis lies in the ability to test at the speed. Maintaining the quality and what value a QA holds for every CI/CD pipeline, I am going to share with you the experience of how we focussed on the testing programs to adjust with CI and agile approaches to development. Exploratory testing is pivotal for a successful CI/CD pipeline, and you can blend it with automation so as to make a growth in testing and business as well. Learn more from Exploratory Testing: It is all about discovery!

All facets of the company in QA needs to be determined when you start integrating QA in the process. Once you have known what needs to be automated, go for it & automate. Functional testing can’t sit in automated testing place because you don’t know what you could program next. In that type of scenario, we blended it with automated test creation depending on the exploratory bugs. Now, the build is filtered after the functional exploratory testing for automating the testing of remaining bugs. Your cognitive skills in functional exploratory testing bring you to a point when you start assembling all the features to test and turn the QA into a gatekeeper for release. Developers start releasing the build to CI/CD servers for the QA department who conducts the test before release using a sturdy CI/CD pipeline.

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Functional and UI testing

Functional and UI testing both are repeated at least once per day, and require 2–3 hours for a medium-sized application. In the case of test automation with Selenium, there is no need to update the automation script frequently, but UI often gets modified, thus require frequent script changes. Both depend on multiple dependencies and both are error-prone and when we have to decide which one to prioritize, I would say bring functional testing before UI testing that makes the best use of resources.

Automated Regression Testing

Regression Testing is used when a developer makes changes to functionality or repairs a bug. The CI system serves as a QA tool for automated regression testing suites for long-standing products, working well for Agile development where teams are supposed to deploy a product at least weekly and have shorter deadlines to accommodate manual regression testing. Another advantage is you can use the infrastructure for your future products and hence accelerating test automation. CI automatically adds new test cases when a new defect is found. The CI builds upon itself a substantial regression test suite running automatically against the new code.

With LambdaTest, you can perform test automation with Selenium in parallel for executing your automated regression test suites over different browsers, browser versions, simultaneously.

Aligning the Agile Testers & Developers

I believe it will always be unfortunate if the quality is portrayed as an after-the-fact, meaning you first underline the requirements and then design, coding, and finally shifting the gears towards quality and say: “let us bring some testers”. Testing or the whole quality is absolutely is an important aspect when you have to ship your products as early as in a week or month. Agile methodologies break down the software development into user stories (smaller tasks). This results in faster feedback, and go-to-market launch. Helping you develop better web-apps, faster. With CI/CD pipeline you can validate your web-application on a more frequent basis. However, automating all facets of building, integrating, testing, and deploying software mitigate risks. And if you see it in the context of Agile vs Waterfall methodology, Agile rapidly leaves behind waterfall methodology by supporting a process in which requirements are expected to change and evolve frequently. While developing websites with frequent overhauls, keeping pace with technology landscape, customer requirements, agile addresses the needs of developers with the selection of effective automation processes. Check out our read on “What I Learned While Moving From Waterfall To Agile Testing?”

Don’t Start Test Automation With Selenium If You Are Clueless!

Sure, there are benefits to test automation with Selenium. However, without a strategy, you could end up using a complex code for a simple code testing. It is important to analyze how different parts can be automated. Undertaking an automation initiative shall not be overlooked but the strategy shall help us meet our goals. I always recommended isolated unit tests which are supported by every language. Fast running unit tests boost the confidence level and ensure the correctness of code in mere seconds. If unit tests fail, no need to move further. Pass unit test implies components are doing well and application is building up all according to the customer expectations. Yes, BDD is the best practices for writing better-automated tests. Here are 8 actionable insights for writing better automation code.

Selecting The Right Automation Testing Tool Based On Your Project Requirements

You can see the widespread market of the automated testing tools, and the important thing is to select the right testing tool that suits your overall requirement: It should support platform and technology like C#, Java, or .Net applications and using which operating systems? Furthermore, take your decision based on whether you need to test web application, or mobile application: Android or iOS or both the operating system. For example, if you wish to perform automated cross browser testing, then Selenium being a reliable open-source comes as the first choice. However, there are still some limitations to it, if you opt for on-premise test automation with Selenium. You are limited to the number of browsers on which you can test in parallel using Selenium Grid. Also, the Selenium Grid to run say 4–8 parallel test sessions would need a very solid hardware requirement. An optimal solution for that would be considered as a cloud-based cross browser compatibility testing tool such as LambdaTest.

LambdaTest offers a Selenium Grid which is compatible with every framework and language that supports Selenium. You get to perform test automation with Selenium on-cloud, at scale. You also get integrations to numerous third-party project-management tool, CI CD tool, along with their Chrome Extension & their WordPress Plugin.

LambdaTest also offers Open Selenium API to help you extract your test details, test reports of your test automation Selenium script execution from LambdaTest platform to your preferred system, without logging into LambdaTest.

Incorporate Continuous Testing In Your CI/CD Pipeline

Continuous testing is a process of evaluating an E2E evaluation of your web-app using a comprehensive range of automated test suites. It ensures quick circulation around feedbacks and upcoming sprints.

CI systems are not restricted to code-level unit tests and can even perform integration testing on interdependent platforms at once. Don’t use integration testing to test business logic, that’s what unit tests are for. CI system run unit tests very fast for every build. Integration testing takes much longer to run whereas unit tests target basic correctness of the code. Units tests should flush out all the bugs of business logic.

Incorporating continuous testing in your CI/CD pipeline, and empower your QA team with faster evaluation using test automation and feedback. Check out our readers to know more about implementing continuous testing in DevOps like a pro.

This Cypress test automation tutorial will help you learn the benefits of Cypress automation, and how to install Cypress and execute Cypress automation testing over scores of browsers and operating systems online.

Introduce Fault Injection Testing For Better Test Coverage Of Your CI/CD Pipeline

As the name suggests, Fault Injection Testing is where you intentionally push faults into your code for enhancing the sturdiness of a web-application, along with the test coverage. Introduce the fault injection testing as a standard part of a review and when your processes and practices get mature, it will ensure the web-application’s resilience. Indeed it is a good practice when you are able to analyze the results of bugs or errors infused in advance before they appear in the production. Though you can conduct the Fault injection tests manually, however, there are tools available for it as well.

Don’t Leave Failing Tests Unattended

A certain level of discipline is necessary for the team that stops to skip any failing test & when you are holding it temporary (i.e. throw SkipException) or using a tool to mute, place the proper comment for the time being and ensure it does not remain unattended or ignored a bit longer in the configuration. A single build does not contain a lot of changes, so reviewing the build time to time can locate the tests. In fact, Reviewing builds with certain changes helps you in identifying any broken test. And the CI/CD pipeline must be stable with a trunk that tells you if a build has failed, either by notification via email or IM. TeamCity provides numerous features and one of them letting you know — who is taking care of failing test.

LambdaTest offers integration with TeamCity to help you fast-track automated cross browser testing on every commit made along with your CI/CD pipeline.

Keep Load Clashes In Mind

CI/CD pipeline incorporates testing to ensure the delivered build is stable and bug-free. While adhering to CI/CD pipeline, reporting of issues is the key factor. A full report furnishes the details on how the tests were run and if anyone failed, the reason behind it. Have you ever tested a web server for performance? Which tool did you use? I would reckon 60% chances are it was JMeter. This tool simulates real-user behaviors and gives sophisticated reports.

The best thing is, Jmeter works with selenium Grid to check the software performance under the multiple and concurrent user traffic. Maven, Jenkins, and Selenium can be used together to create good end-to-end reports, create APPDEX(Application Performance Index), and the documented behavior of the application by hitting browsers concurrently. I have included the performance testing in the talk so that you can mark it since the beginning to avoid unexpected load clashes.

A Meaningful Dashboard

Indeed testing earlier and faster is cumbersome without automation. One of the major challenges for any CI/CD pipeline lies with the collaboration among various teams or departments such as DevOps, QA, Security team, etc. working to bring a common web-application in the market. You would require a place or rather a dashboard that is transparent to all and relays meaningful and organized information. CI/CD tools like Jenkins, Git, and Jira enables teams to coordinate seamlessly and a meaningful dashboard which was customized by assessing what data everyone wants will matter most to your DevOps project. I would recommend adding Feature gadgets configured from different data sources of DevOps tools to help in managing your CI/CD pipeline. A “Feature” gadget breaks down the stories and lets you know which stories are done or in progress yet. A way to drill down deeper to nurture the adoption of a DevOps culture. Different members have different priorities, so you need to perform a progressive assessment when you plan to design a dashboard. It is slightly tricky to make a useful dashboard for CI/CD pipeline, and when everyone consent is important. Nonetheless, it is crucial too!

For instance, if you are performing test automation with Selenium using LambdaTest a cross browser testing cloud, you get an intuitive dashboard which displays test details around timestamps of test case execution, metadata, command-by-command screenshots, Selenium logs, network logs, command logs, video logs which represents recording of your test execution and more.

Go For A Unique Naming Convention To Ensure A UI Resistant CI/CD Pipeline

Automated tools are property-based testing tools that help to locate and identify an object. Depending on the location coordinates, the tool may fail if it finds the change in control caption or location. The UI of any web-application is an ever-changing part. You will have different developers working on different requirements, time over time. Now, you wouldn’t want these developers to go ahead without following a standard naming convention. As a property-based testing tool will fail to pin-point an object if the naming is repetitive. This would become a hassle later on as you would have to rename the old names for your entire web-application. Hence, provide unique names for your controls that will ensure automated tests won’t need changes itself and are resistant to UI changes.

Continuous Deployment & Continuous Delivery, Know The Difference!

If the build is deployed immediately after some modification made in the code base, could be annoying for the users. The key for continuous delivery is to keep the codebase at deployable state, and not practicing continuous deployment doesn’t mean you are not practicing Continuous Delivery. Continuous delivery is a small build cycle and having short sprints in the cycle gives quicker turn times to detect bugs and hence quick fixing of those bugs. Overall, it gives a stable code base early on. This is a preferred method allowing the team to address issues immediately, and not later on when you plan to release the codebase. It offers total control over product rollout, risk factors, and functionality.

User Experience Testing

In user experience testing, you collect qualitative and quantitative data from the users and once your application is assembled, testing objectives turn into the user experience which can be achieved by combining load testing and cross-browser compatibility or mobile testing tools. End-to-end testing is important and also unnecessary extending the length of end-to-end testing needs to be avoided. As it could affect productivity, if you keep on executing more tests, therefore stay focused on right and important things.

“If you want a great site, you’ve got to test. After you’ve worked on a site for even a few weeks, you can’t see it freshly anymore. You know too much. The only way to find out if it really works is to test it.” — Steve Krug — Don’t Make Me Think

Smoke Tests

Smoke testing monitor the system and verify whether the most important features or core functionalities are working. The smoke test allows you to do rapid regression testing of major functionalities indeed, determining if the product is ready for testing to prevent further waste of time and resources.

Automate Deliverable & Deployment

Automatically generated deliverables remain available to a wider audience and the credit goes to automation. Alpha and beta testing can be shifted to more stages of development. A CI/CD pipeline system enables automated deployment with system tests deployment scripts, it helps to ensure the absence of kinks while moving to other environments.

Documentation Is The Foundation Of A Sturdy CI/CD Pipeline

In automated unit testing, quality of code can be protected to document standards, thereby helping to improve the quality of the next solutions. Automated unit tests can also work as self-documenting code; maintaining code plays a vital role in the development of software. Shortage of documentation or difficulty in understanding the code should be dealt with — as the programmers may be reluctant or dislike writing documentation. Having a document that contains all the information that the code is doing should mitigate the unnecessary cost of software maintenance.

Unhandled Interruptions Are Bound To Cause A Test Failure

Platform security, adding failover logic into the framework during the automated tests, logging any kind of interruption, all these cumulative efforts could reduce or avoid interruptions at large extent, leading to thorough validation using test automation. Legitimate bugs or retry attempts may also fail to handle interruptions, therefore a safer approach is “fail the test” in those conditions.

If you are performing test automation with Selenium Grid offered by LambdaTest, then you can mark an automated test as either pass or fail, based on your requirement.

Resource Management Can Help Your Cruise A Long Way

Writing automated script should be assigned to an expert possessing extensive experience of scripting language provided by the automated testing tool. Contrary to that, if one is not versed in writing automated test scripts, maybe that QA engineer is better at writing test cases and can be pulled up when there is no need for in-depth knowledge of scripting languages. Once an automated script is designed you can provide a knowledge transition to automation tester who are less experienced and make them responsible for daily evaluation through that script. Meanwhile, the experienced QA in your team could come up with more out of the box test cases.

Continuous Improvement

The CI/CD pipeline does not end at deployment. The feedback loop, being the heart of CD, indicates an additional phase of monitoring of the deployment. The phase will again use the automated tools to determine the impact of deployment on the end-user. You keep an eye on an obvious metric like business revenue alone with some more granular metrics like engagement time and user conversion rates to observe the correlation.

All team members on the same page

All the team members should be informed consistently, even if they are not sitting on your CI server. Automation notifications can fetch the inaccessible team members of QA in loop helping to keep higher quality overall. Tight feedback loop prevents the unexpected issues, and with everyone is on the same page, through communication apps such as Slack converts the situations in a way allowing you to integrate updates easily, and especially if your team has a large number of daily users.

LambdaTest offers integration with Slack to help you highlight UI issues to your colleague on Slack channels with just a single click.

Conclusion

In the CI/CD methodology, you bake the quality into every step of CI/CD pipeline. Especially, the central feedback loop of Continuous Delivery is a place of constant re-examination to ensure a quality product is being delivered to end-users. Automated tests allow the new features being delivered with bug-free code and expected quality. Project planning for new features involves consideration around analytics, automated testing instrumentation tasks, and performance monitoring.

The entire organization has an important role and should remain focused and incentivized to produce the deliverables with high quality. The role of product managers comes when they need to oversee deployment and quality assurance. The security team should pay attention to the release process. And the major responsibilities of QA team members involved when they test development and staging environments.

All the functions of the QA team should be as much rigor as on production before eventual release. Developers should focus on production release with a detailed investigation. Lastly, choose wisely on the right selection of automation tools. LambdaTest offers 2000+ real browsers along with integrations to CI/CD tools such as Jenkins, Travis CI, and more, to help you incorporate continuous testing in your CI/CD pipeline. Happy testing!

Role of Automation Testing in CI CD Pipeline

Hamidakhtar56 — Tue, 04 Oct 2022 12:59:31 +0000

The industry widely adopted software development practices: Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment ensure delivering the product well and delivering often. Regular code commits require regular/continuous testing and was it to be neglected can lead to a non-resilient infrastructure. How to deliver a sturdy CI CD pipeline? It is a question for many companies unless they approach DevOps consulting. And even if you go to a DevOps consulting firm, there could be a high chance that they may not suggest anything around automation tools, platforms to help you automate your workflow.

I personally believe that the benefits of automation testing are often neglected when we think of best practices in CI/CD pipeline. In my opinion, skipping the automation testing in CI CD pipeline or abandoning the broken tests (never rewritten) could be a clear threat to quality or speedy delivery.

Automation of tests is important when organizations plan to maximize the value of CI/CD. It is why I am going to discuss with you why you can’t have a robust CI/CD pipeline without automation testing. I will also be taking a real-time example to help you relate to why automation testing is a must for CI CD pipeline.

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Skipping Automation Testing Pitfall

Can you assess the pitfall when automated testing is ignored in the continuous delivery pipeline?

Despite the fact, the overall software delivery chain is agile, the undercut automation testing will stop the CD pipeline to derive the core value from the agility.

Developments teams will remain dependent and can’t change the frameworks intuitively as they would not know if the testing team would be compatible with the adaptation.

It prevents the scalability of a software delivery because software tests can’t scale but only when integrated with the continuous delivery chain.

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Why Manual Testing Fails To Suffice The CI CD Pipeline?

Running unit tests cases, basic code quality, security-related test, coverage test cases, etc, and sharing the testing information across the operation team dictates the use of test-driven infrastructure. Although, you might need manual testing occasionally. To use automation testing is the de facto standard for a robust CI/CD pipeline and has been widely co-opted by a large number of organizations.

Along with automation, sometimes manual testing is sensible and straightforward. However, in CI CD pipeline, developers have to handle the small integration of code or updates, thereby not consuming as much time as in manual testing tedium.

Analyzing the pros and cons in making a technical approach let you decide which tests should be automated and which one as manual. It is obvious, repeated and labor-intensive tasks should be pushed to automation. Various types of tests that come in the context of automation are:

Unit and Component testing
API Testing
Functional Testing
Regression Testing
Cross Browser Testing

Units tests are conducted quickly leading to integration tests which will add the next level of complexity. Afterward system-wide tests and at last acceptance test where some level of human interaction may involve.

It is profitable to distinguish and prioritize tests based on which are faster than the others.

Keeping that in mind, it becomes necessary to incorporate automation testing into your CI CD pipeline.

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Importance Of Automation Testing In CI CD pipeline

Code generation in DevOps kick starts the automation. When the code is out to the production, the automation is carried out to the testing solutions in the CI /CD pipeline along with other toolsets. Let’s consider the key factors that make automation testing in CI CD pipeline an absolute necessity.

Gives A Boost To Shift Left Testing

CI CD pipeline comes into existence with a steady stream of changes with minimal delays that ensures the shortening of overall testing duration. It helps to progress on SDLC with shift-left testing which emphasizes the importance of finding bugs as soon as the requirement gathering phase of SDLC.

Shift-left testing methodology conveys that a bug which was discovered in the early stages of SDLC requires less cost & resource bandwidth to be dealt with, as a comparison to a bug that is found in later stages of SDLC. Interesting, isn’t it? Read our blog on how shift-left testing can help your product quality.

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Faster DevOps Means Faster CI CD Pipeline, But What Makes Them Faster?

If you guessed automation testing, then you guessed it right! Integrating automated testing into continuous delivery pipelines covers a crucial component and being without that means things will fall short or an organization may not be able to reap the full benefits of DevOps.

Automated testing is the way by which you can make quality assurance as continuous, reliable, and agile as the rest of the operation in DevOps.

Should the development teams realize the transition to CI/CD, it will expose some challenges which arises off and on in path tracking; and will strengthen testing suites with automation.

Automation Testing In CI CD Pipeline Is An Efficient Move For Releasing Software Updates

Frequent software updates may barely fail to process a staggering number of bugs in a continuous delivery pipeline. The things can get off because consistent and speedy efforts are required by the testing team to address the issues. It increases the risk of a polluted build with problematic code; likely affecting the readability and maintainability of the code.

Skipping Automated Testing may further cause a delay in production and updating the build at regular intervals of time. When DevOps is not standardized with automated testing, a way around to avoid irregular and ad hoc can’t be developed.

The unplanned and random testings without any automated process, or planning eventually fail to streamline the software delivery processes.

Version Control, Roll-back, & Automated Regression Testing

One of the CI/CD pipeline best practice entails code in the central repository where developers can push the code and pull a request for the latest code available for a feature implementation or bug fixes. Using central repository, the code remains up-to-date and all the records of changes to identify differences in versions keep the builds in a maintainable form.

Developers render a kind of experience when they come across an issue which was not accidentally fixed in an earlier version of a software release, or while preparing or fixing the latest build; an unwanted issue pops out.

Latest build turns out to be different from what was actually planned. Now, the option left to save the limited time is roll-back rather than tracking the actual reasons, rather than figuring what actually went wrong? As that could be more deteriorating and time-consuming sometimes.

If bugs keep on popping up, they break the sanity, hinder the continuity. and a challenge to the quality of the application. The roll-back also brings presentations, documents, flow diagrams, etc. under the hood. So the version control system offers you a seamless roll-back feature to save time, effort, and pacify an uncontrolled situation which could arise during the production or release of a build.

To make the most of any CI CD pipeline, prevention of likelihood of rollbacks should be intended, which can be attained by fully automated software testing along with other well-designed components of the pipeline. Because even if you do roll back in a hurry to minimize the damage over customer’s user-experience, brand reputation, you need to evaluate the entire web application is working as it was before you pushed any code changes. For that quick evaluation automation testing in CI CD pipeline works like a magic.

Not convinced yet? Let us evaluate an example scenario related to automated cross browser testing.

**What Is Cross Browser Testing?**

Cross browser testing is a process of rendering a website over different browser to evaluate any UI anomalies. It can be done manually as well as automatically using open source frameworks such as Selenium.

When we practice cross browser testing manually, we may have to sit and run through our website on over hundreds of browsers, & OS combinations based on our target audience.

Now, if your website goes south due to a recent migrated code change into production & as a result, your website’s content, typography, images, icons, padding, company logo, etc. end up looking abrupt then it can cause havoc for your business. Especially, if that gets noticed by your competitors. They can take a screenshot and post a meme on you which won’t take long to go viral. To come out of such a crisis you haphazardly went for a roll-back. But what next?

Now, you need to make sure that the web application is working as good as it was before you pushed changes. If you start evaluating that by manual cross browser testing then I am afraid it can be very troublesome & time-consuming. But if you were incorporating automation testing in CI CD then all you need to do is run an already configured and tested cross browser test suite.

What makes it even better is a cloud-based cross browser testing platforn such as LambdaTest which allows you to test your website on 2000+ browsers and browser versions using an online Selenium Grid.

A comprehensive end-to-end Testing tutorial that covers what E2E Testing is, its importance, benefits, and how to perform it with real-time examples.

Going Parallel With Automation Testing In CI CD Pipeline

The ability to run multiple test cases in parallel is powerful indeed. If we consider our previous outage example then roll-back with automation testing can provide you a sense of relief. However, if the tests are run sequentially then the time taken could be significantly longer when compared with parallel testing. Parallel testing with Selenium can cut short your test cycles ten folds, assuring maximum test coverage with a shorter time period.

Going parallel with automation testing for CI CD pipeline is a key and boon in performing large test scripts at scale. LambdaTest Selenium Grid offers parallel testing for Selenium automation scripts.

Pro-tip: More time-consuming tests should wait for their turn till last, hence use them just before code enters production.

Maintaining Ephemeral Testing Environments Or Staging Environments

Using ephemeral testing environments in containers with the minimal state can forestall the side effects that can slip into subsequent runs of the test suite. Containerized testing environments are portable in which developers can easily replicate the configuration to be used later on in the CI CD pipeline. Also, there is no harm to environmental fidelity as you easily spin up the containers and destroy them.

Unlike ephemeral testing environments, Staging environments are supposed to be durable, long-lasting replica of production environments. Staging environments are pivotal for testing every change prior pushing it to the live web-application. But how do we go about testing a website locally on different browsers?

Selenium

CI CD pipeline is crucial for migrating chances from one staging environment to another, also responsible for final migration to production post sign-off. Performing local automation testing in CI CD pipeline can help you come up with lesser outages, along with a seamless UI & UX, as you know how well your website may look once it goes live.

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Development and Testing Goes Hand In Hand

IT Operation when integrated with the development team construct a DevOps. Although, programmers broadcast a message to system admins to deploy the software in production and similarly, the constant communication leads to the faster software delivery with maximum visibility. Nonetheless, it can’t wipe out the role of automation testing.

Automation testing is a prerequisite in DevOps without which a software delivery can’t be optimized through which a development and operation teams become able to work in tandem.

That means that automation testing needs to be introduced to achieve the true essence of CI/CD. It further makes the coordination easy among the development and IT Ops teams.

Eliminating Roadblocks

As all the changes are going to pass through CI/CD systems, it will eliminate or minimize the problematic resources. Complex running tests should be followed after the build gets validated by quick-running tests.

Splitting testing efforts can effectively undermine the effects of size and complexity of larger tests which create a deployment risk in larger products. Hence, smaller versions are recommended for a quick release of the build.

Once you split these tests, putting them in the queue and running them in parallel using automation testing for CI CD pipeline will help you with a robust mechanism, allowing you to find & eliminate tiny roadblocks.

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Better Product Visibility & Feedback

Automated tests such as unit or interface testing provide greater visibility on the product’s state at any point of the time. Test automation for CI CD is a way to retrieve the feedback for developers so that a quick fix can take place to always manage a build in a releasable stage.

Easy Reconfiguration With Automation Testing In CI CD Pipeline

Test automation implies most of the reconfiguration can be enabled automatically. A tendency to adjust configurations or framework with the advent of new technology or when the requirement might change, at any given point of time, makes the CI/CD pipeline robust.

In this tutorial, learn what is Regression testing, its importance, types, and how to perform it.

CI/CD Best Practices for DevOps Journey

You can find potential benefits by incorporating a set of practices which will define how a CI/CD system can be maintained and implemented efficiently.

Cutting-down Tests of Low Values

In CI/CD, comprehensive testing pipeline ensures nothing unexpected happens during the changes into the production deployment.

Changes have to move through the process so a dependable and fast pipeline can stop hindering the development velocity.

The much better idea is to scale out the CI/CD infrastructure with optimizing tests. On the other hand, the passage of time can reinforce some critical decisions with respect to the relative value of tests.

It is also logical to filter your test suites by cutting down some of the tests with low values so that you can increase the speed of your heavily used pipelines.

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Reliable Performance Validation With Automation Testing In CI CD Pipeline

Performance testing remains out of the scope due to the complexity and sometimes scenario is so exceedingly onerous that only manual testing is able to move things forward. Nevertheless, most of the times companies make few tweaks and changes in approach to scale the breadth of automated performance testing.

After understanding the difference between performance and functional testing, companies need to tailor a level based test plan which determines the layers for automated performance testing.

Contributors and stakeholders understand the limitation of performance testing, and when a realistic understanding allows the changes in behavior around the way, positive results start appearing!

In automation testing, the code moves from test to production via staging environment.

In functional testing, logic is checked to decide pass or fail. Unlike Functional testing, performance tests put a limit. It is particularly sensitive in terms of the details of the runtime environment.

Performance testing depends on infrastructure that must be consistently appropriate.

It is antithetical if a runtime environment is not provisioned to support the purpose of the tests. In performance testing, execution time counts. Depending on virtual test nodes in parallel execution, time can vary and can take a lot of time indeed.

Waiting around for a long time in CI/CD is an impediment as CI/CD is all about moving code fast from the development environment. Therefore, performance testing can’t take place within the CI/CD pipeline and is processed before the code moves to the production.

That means large-scale performance testing is moved out of the CI/CD pipeline. And, performance testing requires an environment that is identical to the production environment.

For most of the CI/CD environments, it is not feasible to support a production like a runtime environment. It is expensive and companies approach the cloud-based testing services that allow mission-critical performance testing.

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Automation Testing In CI CD Pipeline Is Only As Good As Your Automation Tool

Continuous Integration, a cornerstone technique of DevOps merges the code updates into the code repositories but what if code repositories or integration servers make a transformation in the future. When the organization decides to change a web app into a hybrid app, similarly many development changes will take place that will ask for a broad array of frameworks. An adaptation into a kind of testing solutions that can support the changing needs and maintain the agility of continuous delivery pipeline will become inevitable.

CI/CD, when augmented by robust tooling, reduces the time to integrate changes, minimizes errors during integration, and increases project velocity. A plethora of tools exist, ranging from free, open-source to commercial. They all are designed to support different testing types and technologies.

You can make a decision based on your experience, budget, and requirements. Keep on looking at the pros and cons of the tool you plan to select such as how many concurrent builds you require or how much time is needed for your data retention.

If you are looking for a web testing solution that provides automation testing for CI CD then LambdaTest is your go-to platform. It provides a scalable, online Selenium Grid for automated cross browser testing, along with integrations to multiple CI/CD tools such as Jenkins, Travis CI, CircleCI, etc.

That is not all, with LambdaTest, you can even perform automated cross browser testing with Selenium on locally hosted web pages or web-app. Plus, you can execute multiple test scripts in parallel. You also get integrations with project management tools such as JIRA, asana, Trello, etc. for easy bug logging & better collaboration among colleagues.

Along with Selenium automation, LambdaTest provides a complete browser compatibility testing solution by offering responsive testing, bulk screenshot testing, visual regression testing and more.

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Conclusion

By adopting or arming your developers with CI CD pipeline you can keep up with the rapid demands of modern SDLC methodologies such as Agile, Kanban, etc. A CI CD pipeline would empower you to push code changes live from your Staging environment to Production environment on a monthly, weekly, and even daily basis. Splitting your tests on the basis of complexity and efforts is always a wise move. Automation testing in CI CD will help you push your code changes from staging environments to production, along with organized version control for roll-back scenarios. If you are running an exhaustive test suite then parallel testing can help you save a considerable amount of time. Adios!

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