Nowadays, there is a lot of talk about quality gates — milestones between the stages of the project delivery cycle. Quality gates are essential for creating top-quality software. But for some reason, they are all too often thought of as meetings where people just sit together and manually go through checklists.
In reality, a quality gate is any check that can stop product delivery if it is not passed. Even something as simple as an IDE warning can prevent you from running your code — which means it's a quality gate. There are plenty of such quality gates in a delivery cycle, but among the most efficient ones are automated tests with pipelines. Here’s why.
The Advantages of Using Automated Tests and Pipelines
By placing automated tests into build and deployment pipelines, you get automated quality gates that provide fast and continuous feedback. You can specify whether a deployment fails when it doesn't pass through all the quality gates or just one of them, depending on how strict you want to be with your pipelines.
Due to the automated nature of the tests, once you have a successful pipeline run, you’ll have the confidence that you’ve achieved the best quality without having to manually track your progress. This is more efficient than manual quality gates and saves lots of time. You can add numerous gates into many pipelines until you’ve automated almost 100% of your testing life cycle.
Of course, automation doesn't happen overnight. It's a process that takes time and effort, and if you want to know more about it you can read our guide on how to integrate automated testing into DevOps. But despite the effort automation is worth the expenditure. Humans hurry, get tired, and make mistakes. Code doesn't.
The Best Tools for Quality Gates
- Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel: For simple quality gate checklists, Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel are excellent.
- Trello: For automated updates between teams, use Trello to integrate messaging tools such as Slack.
- Atlassian JIRA: With Atlassian JIRA, you can put your quality gates into a dynamic dashboard to provide broader visibility for your team.
- Atlassian Confluence: You can create a shared space with checklists and documented quality gates for your team with Atlassian Confluence.
In Summary
If you've got automated tests as quality gates it doesn't mean you need to get rid of all your manual tests. But you can trigger the manual test runs automatically, and rely on the automated tests to give the go-ahead if everything is in order. Automated tests don't require gathering meetings and going through checklists by hand. In other words, they are automated quality gates.
Learn more about Qameta Software
Qameta Software focuses on developing amazing tools to help software testers. Learn more about Allure Framework, a lightweight automation reporting tool, and Allure TestOps, the all-in-one DevOps-ready testing platform.
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