On which branch should I test?

A branching strategy helps define how the delivery team functions and how each feature, improvement, or bug fix is handled. It is a strategy used by development teams when interacting with a version control system for writing and managing code.  What does that have to do with testing or automation?  

Automation strategy focuses primarily on tools, types of test, test environment, etc. When testers are asked if they are testing in the right test environment, often the answer is “in the test environment I’m given by the developers”. To implement CI/CD, that allows seamless integration and deployment, and to ensure good code quality, we need to remove the confusion about how code flows and which tests should be run at each stage.  

• On which branch should testers test?   
• Where should I run the automated tests?  
• How can I be sure that the code base I tested is what will be deployed to  production? 

These are some of the common questions I’ve come across often when establishing a new  QA team or when implementing automation. 

Branching strategy should be integrated with the overall test process, including the automation strategy. Let us start to look into how we can enhance visibility  and improve test coverage with better understanding of the branching strategy. 

Key Takeaways  

From this talk the audience will  

• Where should a QA team test based on the branching model? 
• How branching strategy affects automation strategy?  
• How are SRE,  Chaos Engineering impacted by the branching strategy?