For the past five years, CircleCI has hired third-party penetration testing firms that hammer our product releases or infrastructure at minimum every 90 days. To date, we’ve done more than 25 of these. Sometimes they cover new product features and other times they cover infrastructure.

Testing in isolation is known to be expensive. It’s time-consuming to execute thoroughly, and it typically requires a testing environment — sometimes multiple testing environments. That said, testing in isolation is undeniably effective.

If you work anywhere near the field of software development, you’ve likely already heard that you should always write code that is well-tested. Everyone wants to have well-tested code and for a good reason! Testing ensures our code is working as intended and protects against regression. Thoroughly testing code helps teams confidently ship software faster and with fewer issues.

The software is subjected to several tests during and after development to ensure that it is as polished as possible before it is made available to the end users. So, here is the list of the top 10 software testing tools that an individual can use.

Testing is one of those activities that if not exhaustive will not have its complete impact on your software development process. Oftentimes developers are only concerned about testing the application layer of the system (a.k.a the codebase) and ignore testing the data layer (the database) which is also as important as testing the code itself.

Continuous testing has emerged as a popular practice within DevOps, assisting teams in their quest to release high quality software on demand. While test data management (TDM) practices are extremely important to ensure that testing is effective, various surveys have indicated that TDM issues are one of the leading causes of delays in testing and application delivery.

Load testing isn’t an engineer’s favorite task. Every setup choice made during performance testing will yield varying results. The chosen load test protocol is the difference between an application that performs well under most circumstances and one that buckles at hidden stress points. Yet failing to run adequate tests isn’t an option when dealing with a complex API architecture. Needless to say, all your load testing options must be carefully evaluated.

To release reasonably secure products, vendors must integrate software security processes throughout all stages of the software development lifecycle. That would include product architecture and design; implementation and verification; deployment and monitoring in the field; and back again to design to address the changing threat landscape, market needs, and product issues.