A self-paced foundations course for developers, testers and DevOps engineers who want testing to keep pace with frequent delivery. Seven lessons cover what continuous testing is, the test pyramid and test types, building an automation strategy, testing inside CI/CD pipelines, test data and environments, performance and security testing, and testing in production with quality metrics. Each lesson ends with an exercise using your own codebase or pipeline.
What you will learn
- Explain continuous testing and shift-left and shift-right testing
- Apply the test pyramid to balance test types
- Decide what to automate and how to keep tests maintainable
- Design pipeline stages with quality gates
- Manage test data and environments safely
- Include performance and security testing in delivery
- Use quality metrics and production feedback to improve
Lessons
- What Continuous Testing Means
- The Test Pyramid and Test Types
- Building an Automation Strategy
- Testing in CI/CD Pipelines
- Test Data and Environments
- Performance and Security Testing
- Testing in Production and Quality Metrics
Self-paced course from Tech Skills Library. Educational content only; it is not an accredited qualification, licence or credential.
Lessons
What Continuous Testing Means
The Test Pyramid and Test Types
The test pyramid is a model for balancing test types. It suggests many fast, low-level tests and fewer slow, high-level tests. Layers Unit tests: test small pieces of code in isolation. Fast, numerous, cheap to maintain. Integration or service tests: test how components work together, such as an API with its database. End-to-end or UI […]
Building an Automation Strategy
Automation is essential for continuous testing, but automating the wrong tests wastes effort. What to automate Repeated regression checks. Critical business journeys. Data validation and calculations. API behaviour. Smoke tests after deployment. What not to automate One-off checks. Rapidly changing early prototypes. Usability and visual judgement that need human insight. Maintainable tests Keep tests independent […]
Testing in CI/CD Pipelines
Pipelines run tests automatically on every change and stop defective changes from progressing. Pipeline stages Commit stage: compile, static analysis, unit tests. Aim for feedback in under ten minutes. Integration stage: integration and contract tests in a test environment. Acceptance stage: acceptance and end-to-end tests on a production-like environment. Non-functional stage: performance and security tests. […]
Test Data and Environments
Reliable tests need reliable data and environments. Many test failures are caused by environment problems rather than code defects. Test data strategies Synthetic data generated for tests. Subsets of production data that are masked or anonymised. Data created by the test itself and cleaned up afterwards. Never use unmasked personal data in test environments without […]
Performance and Security Testing
Non-functional qualities such as performance and security must be tested continuously, not just before go-live. Performance testing types Load testing: expected volumes. Stress testing: beyond expected volumes to find breaking points. Soak testing: sustained load over time to find leaks. Spike testing: sudden increases. Performance in the pipeline Run small performance checks on every build […]
Testing in Production and Quality Metrics
Some risks only appear in production. Testing in production safely, and measuring quality, closes the feedback loop. Techniques Synthetic monitoring: scripted transactions run continuously. Canary releases: expose changes to a small group first. Feature flags: enable features for selected users. Observability: logs, metrics and traces to understand behaviour. Chaos experiments: deliberately inject failures to test […]