Sustainable Continuous Testing in DevOps Pipeline

Green IT and Sustainable Software Development practices are now essential concerns that are being measured and reported. Companies are looking to limit or contain their carbon footprint across the software development lifecycle. We propose driving this change forward by looking at the carbon footprint across test practices. This can be achieved by a focused reduction of the number of test cycles executed with automation without compromising on quality. We introduce the concept of Green Continuous Test (Green CT). It is established that test optimization as a practice can limit the production of test work products to those essential tests that provide coverage and thereby reduce the automation scripting efforts. It is therefore integral to adoption of Green CT practices. More can be done by measuring and limiting the number of automated test execution runs themselves as a part of the Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery/Deployment process without compromising quality. Continuous Testing in the Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery/Deployment (CI/CD) has typically depended on automated test execution, without heeding the impact of the same on the organization's sustainable IT practices. In this paper, we discuss the key aspects to be considered in the verification and validation processes, that can be engineered to limit the impact on the carbon consumption. We also bring focus to the need for the right trade-off between automated test execution and targeted continuous testing and provide a measurement / formula to help calculate the positive impact that Green CT bring into enterprises. We also cover the need to continuously manage and optimize out test corpus as a part of test management activities. This is an essential governance aspect that will ensure that green IT across test processes is sustainable.