Continuous Delivery and DevOps - A Quickstart Guide - Third Edition

Incorporating automated tests

We've looked at the merits of using automated tests to help prove the quality of each software component as it is being released, but what if you were to group these tests together and run them continuously against a given environment? This way, you would end up with a vast majority of the platform being tested over and over again—continuously, in fact.

If you were to capture the results of these tests, you can quickly and easily see how healthy the environment is, or, more precisely, you could see whether the software is behaving as expected. If tests start failing, we can look at what has changed since that last successful run and try to pinpoint the root cause.

There are, of course, many caveats to this: