My Daughter's Gymnastics and Continuous Testing - Observance to Success

By Savinder Puri, DevOps Evangelist, Zensar Technologies

Savinder Puri, DevOps Evangelist, Zensar Technologies

I have a six year old daughter who is super active! Until she’s asleep, she can be seen literally running or jumping around the house. In order to channelise this boundless energy, we enrolled her for gymnastics. This is the journey of her gymnastics class and my observance of its proximity to continuous testing that I see with customers across the world at my work.

Smooth as silk

I’m sure you have seen the smooth-as-silk expert gymnasts who just seem to float on the bars and beams. It all seems so effortless when you see them perform the magical manoeuvres. And yet, anyone who has ever tried one back-flip can tell, it takes years of toil and broken limbs to get there.

We often hear of organisations who run Simian Army or similar chaos engineering toolsets, with thousands of test cases executing on production, trying to uncover corner case issues. And we go in awe similar to the expert gymnast, little realising that this is the result of hundreds of hours of painstaking automation to get there coupled with the even more painful culture change to sustain it.

The scare of the beam

I remember the first time my daughter was told to get up on the gymnastic beam. She was so scared to even stand on it, fearing a fall. With all the cushions in place and a very encouraging coach by her side, she slowly became comfortable.

And soon enough, everything in the house was simulated as the beam!

When a mid-sized retail customer of mine first embarked on the journey of continuous testing, the reaction was similar: 1. Is it really worth the investment? 2. We should instead focus those new features that business has been demanding! 3. How will we ever get over the high technical debt in testing? 4. We can never get to in-sprint testing! With top management support, meticulous planning, encouragement from an Agile coach and a relentless let’s-do-it team, this and more was achieved over a period of time!

Tiny tots and tiny steps

Imagine ten little kiddos flipping on the gymnastics floor in perfect symphony. It is such a delight to watch that the heart melts out. It seems that they were born to do just this. Their hustle of practising the routine at home the entire term break and constantly knocking things over seems like a thing of the past.

Imagine the joy of your sanity tests being automated and integrated with your DevOps pipeline, being executed at 7 AM against the latest build automatically, even before you enter office, and the tests results emailed to you. Manual testing seems like a thing of the past.

The perfect cartwheel - star of the month

With sustained practise and a thousand falls, my daughter started getting the hang of the cartwheel. She made it a habit to attempt a cartwheel as soon as she’d walked about 10 steps. No matter where she was. And then she got better at it. And then, she got the “star of the month”, for the perfect cartwheel!

The retail customer had also got the hang of testing. They made it a habit to incorporate testing efforts within each sprint. Dedicated teams were formed to accelerate the test case automation coverage, and it was added to the CI pipeline to become truly continuous. Workshops were done to explain on the rational for this investment. Slowly and surely, testing was becoming everyone’s responsibility, including business. And then, they achieved up to 80 percent test coverage for the first time ever!

County Gymnastic Championships and Black Friday

The County Gymnastic Championships have just been announced, and my daughter has been selected in. She is completely focused on this event and is going all out. For all you know, this could set the stage for her life pursuit.

Black Friday is coming up and the retail customer is gearing up for its biggest season yet, backed by continuous testing. For all you know, this could set the stage for the next growth phase of their business.

Good Luck and God Speed!