Modern Pipeline - Release Stage
After your automated System Level Tests have passed, it's time to go through QA & UAT Testing, and prepare for releasing to Production!
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In the previous article, Modern Pipeline - Acceptance Stage, we verified whether our System works correctly, by running automated System Level Tests. Within the Acceptance Stage, it deployed the System to the Acceptance Environment, ran Health Checks, Smoke Tests, Acceptance Tests, External System Contract Tests, and E2E Tests.
Since the Acceptance Stage assured us that our System satisfies Acceptance Criteria, i.e. that it works correctly from End User facing perspective, we’re now ready to make the System available to humans, most importantly:
Release the System to QA Environment, so that QA Engineers can test it
Release the System to Production Environment, so that Users can use it
Note: We’re not limited to just the QA Environment. We’ll see some additional environments below.
Note II: The Acceptance Stage covers only functional testing, but it does not cover non-functional testing. You can consider having additional stages, e.g. Load Test Stage, Stress Test Stage, Soak Test Stage, Security Test Stage, Resilience Test Stage, etc. To summarize, to perform automated non-functional testing, you need to add additional stages to the Pipeline.
QA Stage
In the Acceptance Stage, we had automatic verification that the System works correctly, that it satisfies functional requirements.
For a version of the System that passed the Acceptance Stage, we need to make it available for humans for both functional and non-functional testing, involving:
Exploratory Testing
Usability Testing (UX Testing)
Visual Testing (Cross-browser & Cross-device UI Testing)
Exploratory Security Testing
Note: QA Engineer should NOT perform Manual Regression Testing! Automated Regression Testing was already executed by the Acceptance Stage. It's important to note that here we’re referring to Functional Regression Testing, since that should be automated not done manually.
