What 24x7 testing is all about?

In my previous post, I mentioned about 24x7 testing as one item in the agile testing world. Here, I would like to highlight some details about 24x7 testing and its advantages.

What is 24x7 Testing?

As the name tells, it is about running your automated test suite 24x7 in a continuous manner. We could take a subset of the regression suite, or entire regression suite for the same purpose. They test cases should run continuously in any one of your favourite environments all the time.

Why should we run tests 24x7?

There are several issues which can be unveiled only by running your tests 24x7. For example, there could be some particular strange behaviour which occurs only when the system is running for 7 days continuously. Or, there could be some performance issue with web sessions being handled imprudently. Then after several hundred users use the system, the issue is evident as there are too many sessions dangling in the system. In order to find out such issues, it is exigent demand that we run test cases 24x7 and divulge such issues before a customer finds it out.

Now assume your system is integrated with some external 3rd party system. By running tests 24x7, we might observe that many things may go wrong and behave differently. For example, if your product is deployed on say Amazon instance. EC2 instances may come and go, RDS fail-over might happen, S3 error handling and retires could happen etc. We can improve our product to be impervious to such cases and make the product more resilient.

So what are you waiting for? start running your test cases 24x7 and thereby make your customers gleeful about using your products.