Test Orchestration: What is it?

We’re sure you’ve heard your DevOps team often talk about test orchestration. This testing approach has quickly become a crucial element of test automation because it streamlines the automation process.

For agile teams, applying test orchestration to their testing strategy is quite rewarding as it accelerates testing and offers a holistic view of the testing process.

In this post, we’ll discuss test orchestration in-depth and understand the benefits you can reap with its implementation.

What is Test Orchestration?

In simple words, test orchestration refers to a series of automation tasks that you schedule in a linear order. You can execute your tests consecutively, and you’re in control of deciding their order.

Often regarded as the building blocks of automated testing — the whole point of test orchestration is to optimize the test strategy on a holistic level.

With test orchestration, you can grab insights into the big picture of your deployment, which fosters transparency and helps your team plan and modify the test strategy. 

Besides, it offers you the flexibility to test a software or certain features of a software repeatedly during the development stages. This helps detect and fix errors as and when they occur. In test orchestration, you can execute multiple automated tests as a part of the testing workflow.

What are the Benefits of Test Orchestration?

The core goal of test automation is to achieve faster time-to-market and streamline automated testing tasks along with manual or repetitive tasks. Let’s understand more of its advantages. 

1. Optimized test process: Test orchestration gives you the ultimate control over planning your test automation strategy, including your test schedules.

You can also leverage various tools such as automated testing tools, project management tools, DevOps tools, etc., to achieve overall efficiency.

Using these tools and a roadmap for your testing strategy — you can progress your development cycles for an optimized and flexible test process. 

2. Customization:  The best part about test orchestration is its flexibility to customize your test strategy based on your budget and goals. For instance, say you want to prioritize specific areas of your test, you can go ahead and schedule those in combination with other tests.

Just so you know, test orchestration can function with little to no human intervention — which means, if you have a minimal budget for resources, you can opt for test orchestration.

3. 100% continuous testing: For agile and DevOps teams, this is a blessing in disguise. With test orchestration, you can test 24×7 and also schedule tests as per your convenience.

While you can automate monotonous or repetitive tasks, you can also run the same tests multiple times from the start to the end. This heightens your test efficiency and fits into your CI/CD pipeline.

Check Out: DevOps Orchestration

4. More transparency: We’ve already established that test orchestration lets you look at the big picture. Developers, testers, and product managers can work in tandem in understanding the journey of the product.

From knowing its timelines and progress to monitoring its errors and release timelines — test orchestration offers a comprehensive picture of the entire testing stage. 

5. Data-driven: If you implement the right tools for test orchestration, you can foster a data-driven culture in your testing strategy. You can fetch extensive data on your test performance and plan your test strategy.

What is the Difference Between Test Automation and Test Orchestration?

The difference between test automation and test orchestration is perhaps the most discussed aspect of test orchestration. While both vary, test automation can generate solid results when test orchestration is introduced into your test strategy.

Usually, there is a lot of confusion between test orchestration and test automation, but here’s the difference: test automation is the process of automating a task, while test orchestration is the act of scheduling or putting those automated tasks in a well-defined order.

One automates tests; the other strategize the order of tests and decides which tasks should be tested and in what sequence. In a nutshell — test orchestration brings an order to test automation. 

To understand better, let’s take an example. Orchestration is a word derived from the orchestra. As you know, a musical orchestra involves multiple pieces of equipment and musicians; a maestro leads the orchestra, and all of them come together in composing a symphony.

Similarly, test orchestration gathers numerous tests and automation tools (bug management, analytics, project management) to help craft reliable software.

Is Test Orchestration the Future of QA?

Yes, absolutely! With technology advancement and more businesses embracing digital transformation — speed and high-quality software are of the essence. With tech orchestration, a business can accelerate its testing process, therefore, expediting development too.

Feedback cycles will surely get shorter, and as and when you scale, you can formulate a solid testing strategy with orchestration. However, you’ll need the right automated tool to introduce test orchestration into your organization. 

Orchestrate Your Tests & Use Inbuilt Integrations for a Successful Test Automation

Successful implementation of test orchestration requires more than just a skilled team. If you give your skilled team an all-encompassing tool for performing the test orchestration, they can explore the best possibilities.

An ideal tool will let you customize based on your evolving project requirements. Besides, it should support various test management, bug management, CI/CD integrations to help orchestrate a solid test strategy. 

Implement Test Orchestration with Testsigma

Testsigma is an AI-powered automation testing tool that supports multiple integrations and goes beyond just automation with all the features it has to offer. Let’s explore them:

1. Test Data Management: Testsigma comes with a superior test data management system that lets you generate test data using its simple UI. You can test your software against various data combinations; also, you can write custom functions for custom requirements or import data (from any format) onto the platform for a truly data-driven culture. 

2. Test Prioritization: Testsigma lets you prioritize your tests based on your requirement. This is a cloud-based platform that runs 24×7 — so you can schedule your test cases, which are executed without any human intrusion. 

3. Bug management: Testsigma goes beyond record-and-play. Its AI capabilities maintain 70% of the tests, and they automatically fix flakiness. This tool takes screenshots and maintains logs of bugs; it’s also intelligent enough to identify error-prone areas based on past bug patterns.

All the crashes and bugs are reported via email, Slack, or any communication platform. It also generates exhaustive reports on bugs to help you fix them before production. 

4. Results dashboard: Using Testsigma’s inbuilt results dashboard, you can gather test results and execution trends after every test run. It also fetches a detailed report on how well tests are performing in multiple environments. 

Apart from these features — Testsigma is a codeless testing platform that lets you write test scripts in simple English. It supports parallel test executions, and you can run hundreds of tests concurrently in multiple environments.

Plus, it comes with thousands of real devices and OS-browser combinations for you to run tests on. You can utilize this end-to-end testing platform to plan, prioritize, strategize, and orchestrate all your tests from one place. 

Interested in trying it out?