INTEGRATION OF UI AND API TESTING INTO CI/CD PROCESSES AS A FACTOR IN ACCELERATING THE RELEASE OF DIGITAL PRODUCTS

ABSTRACT

The article analyzes the role of UI and API testing within CI/CD processes, which play a key role in accelerating the release of digital products to the market. The advantages of automated testing, which enhance development speed, reduce time spent on validation, and minimize defects, are discussed. The significance of integrating testing at the early stages of the product life cycle is assessed, highlighting its role in mitigating risks and reducing time-to-market. Particular emphasis is placed on the methodology for developing test coverage and optimizing the distribution of various test types within the CI/CD pipeline.

АННОТАЦИЯ

Статья посвящена анализу роли UI- и API-тестирования в рамках CI/CD-процессов, которые играют важную роль в ускорении вывода цифровых продуктов на рынок. Рассматриваются преимущества автоматизированного тестирования, позволяющего повысить скорость разработки, снизить затраты времени на валидацию и минимизировать количество дефектов. Оценивается важность интеграции тестирования на ранних этапах жизненного цикла продукта, что способствует снижению рисков и сокращению времени выхода на рынок. Особое внимание уделяется методологии построения тестового покрытия и оптимальному распределению различных типов тестов в CI/CD-пайплайне.

Keywords: CI/CD, test automation, UI testing, API testing, time-to-market, test coverage.

Ключевые слова: CI/CD, автоматизация тестирования, UI-тестирование, API-тестирование, время выхода на рынок, тестовое покрытие.

Introduction

Modern conditions of the digital economy subject software products' release to tighter requirements of tempo and quality. Competitiveness of organizations lies primarily in the ability to respond quickly to user need changes and add new functions without sacrificing reliability and stability. Continuous integration and delivery practices prove to be highly effective in automating testing, release, and software development processes. Despite the presence of CI/CD processes, the effectiveness of the product lifecycle can be significantly compromised without a quality control plan implemented at the early stages.

Test automation, one of the drivers of the success of CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery), allows you to have secure assurance of functionality and component interaction before product utilization through including UI and API tests in continuous delivery pipelines. Although such solutions are widely used, the impact of UI and API tests on accelerating product launch and improving business performance still requires further study. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the role of automated testing within CI/CD as a tool that accelerates the release cycles of digital products.

Materials and methods

The role of CI/CD in accelerating the life cycle of digital products

The development of CI/CD practices was a logical step in the evolution of software engineering process development under the pressure of demands for scalable, controlled and predictable production of digital products. Implementation of CI/CD means periodic automation of the whole software product life cycle-from writing code to its deployment into a productive environment. The key goal in this practice is to minimize the time between change and delivery to the end user as much as possible while also maintaining a high level of reliability and quality (fig. 1).

Figure 1. CI/CD model [1]

One of the main advantages of CI/CD is to ensure continuous delivery of new features without the need for manual intervention in the build, testing and deployment process. Automating these steps allows organizations to release updates at multiple frequencies compared to traditional cascading development models.

Time-to-market speed is particularly valuable in highly competitive environments, where even a small backlog can result in a loss of market share. CI/CD significantly reduces time-to-market by reducing the time required to validate changes and ensuring their immediate distribution. This results in an accelerated feedback cycle between developers, testers, and business stakeholders. This, in turn, allows you to quickly adapt the functionality to changing requirements and minimize the risk of errors on the product [2].

Special attention in the context of CI/CD is paid to the concept of «shift-left», which implies the transfer of quality control points (including testing) to earlier stages of the life cycle. This approach can significantly reduce the cost of fixing defects and avoid the accumulation of technical debt. Moreover, mature CI/CD practices involve integrating quality metrics into each stage of the pipeline, ensuring transparency of development processes and an objective assessment of the release's readiness for market launch.

Place of UI and API testing in the CI/CD architecture

One of the most essential needs for stability and CI/CD process predictability maintenance is a well-designed, automated testing system built directly into the pipeline infrastructure. UI testing and API testing play a special role for this purpose, each performing some specific tasks and having some specific functional role at different stages of the software product delivery process.

The user interface is checked through testing that reproduces standard user actions in the application. These tests are extremely crucial for checking the availability, interaction, and visual correctness of provided functionality. Their major advantage is in the ability to detect hidden defects while testing logic at business component level. However, UI tests are more brittle and resource-intensive: they must deploy a complete environment, including the frontend, and are typically time-consuming. Because of this, in CI/CD practice, UI tests are positioned closer to the end of the pipeline, where they serve as an additional control filter before release [3].

Unlike UI-tests, API-testing is an easier and more flexible way to validate functionality at the level of interaction logic between system modules. These tests allow you to check the behavior of services, data exchange, correctness of business rules, and response to non-standard input parameters without the need to visualize the interface. API tests scale well, are consistently reproducible, and are excellent for inclusion in the early stages of CI/CD, where rapid diagnosis of functional errors is required without significant time costs. Moreover, they can effectively replace or supplement unit and integration tests, ensuring early detection of defects and minimizing the cost of correction.

The optimal distribution of UI and API tests in the CI/CD pipeline allows you to achieve a balance between speed, stability, and completeness of test coverage. In a typical architecture, modern organizations use a «pyramid of automation», where the base consists of unit tests, the middle level – API tests, and the top – UI tests. This distribution ensures both the depth of analysis and the stability of pipelines to failures, creating conditions for stable and predictable delivery of changes to a productive environment. This is especially true when building scalable and fault-tolerant digital solutions, including in the fintech industry, where reliability and modularity of infrastructure are critically important [4].

Results and discussion

Test automation and its contribution to time-to-market reduction

One of the fundamental elements that significantly accelerate the process of product development and market launch is test automation. Automated tests within CI/CD pipelines provide real-time validation of change throughout the development lifecycle, minimizing the time required to locate and correct defects. Automation can dramatically speed up the speed and volume of test running over manual testing, especially for frequent release and fast product update companies.

The largest advantage of automation is that it can run tests rapidly and repeatedly without the intervention of human intervention. This allows you to test not just the basic functionality, but also do stress testing, load testing, and performance testing, which would be extremely difficult and time-consuming in manual mode. For example, one food industry customer achieved 70% of regression test time saving when he employed tailored test automation solutions that were created by LQA automated testing experts [5]. This, in turn, decreases time-to-market, which is vital for maintaining the pace with the so dynamic market.

Automated test environments allow testing immediately upon changes being added to the system, and thereby allow detection of possible errors and deviations from the desired behavior simultaneously. This reduces the number of defects that can be discovered only during manual testing at cycle's end, and reduces the need for expensive repairs at later stages of development. In addition, testing is carried out at any stage of development, and therefore there is a chance to ensure continuous quality control, starting from the initial stages of work on the product and up to its release.

Additionally, the test automation provides the opportunity to integrate it with other CI/CD solutions, for instance, monitoring and reporting tools, in order to make development operations more transparent. The information regarding passed tests, bugs found, and performance can be accessed by all members of the team, and this facilitates rapid response to found issues. This is aligned with the overall principles of business process optimization, such as minimizing downtime, lowering transaction costs, and enhancing efficiency in operations [6]. Consequently, error correction and reversal of changes take a much shorter time, which has a direct impact on product launch speed to the market.

Methodological aspects of building effective test coverage

Acing good test coverage is a central component of effective implementation of testing in CI/CD pipelines. Good coverage is not only about the number of tests, but also about their quality, and how they are being positioned in the pipeline architecture. The main requirement here is balancing testing speed and coverage by completeness because over-testing results in a huge rise in pipeline execution time, which goes against the aim of CI/CD-product release to market rapidly (table 1).

Table 1.

Types of tests and their purpose in CI/CD

One of the main methodological problems is determining which tests should be performed at each level of the system. The classic model of the testing pyramid, which includes unit tests at the base and more complex integration and UI tests at the top, is the basis for an effective approach. In this model, unit tests make up the bulk of tests, as they are fast and reliable, but they are not enough to fully test the integration of system components. Therefore, to ensure the stability of the application, it is important to integrate integration and functional tests into the CI/CD process, and UI tests should serve as an additional check, ensuring the correct interaction with the user [7].

There are several underlying principles to bear in mind when you are building tests. Tests need to be isolated first, which allows you to speed up their execution and avoid errors based on external dependencies (fig. 2).

Figure 2. Key principles for building reliable tests: isolation and repeatability

Secondly, test repeatability must be taken into account, as tests should remain stable and produce consistent results regardless of the execution environment. This is achieved through well-documented test data and automatic test environment setup utilities.

Also quite critical is code coverage, and it can be measured through a variety of metrics, including line coverage, branch coverage, or functional coverage. With these, not only can you determine completeness of testing but also identify weak areas in test coverage that require additional effort. But too high a coverage ratio is not necessarily an indication of quality. Studies have proven that not only the number of tests, but even their ability to detect defects, especially during early stages of development, is the reason behind the effectiveness of testing [8].

Thus, effective test coverage development requires a comprehensive approach that includes balancing the number and quality of tests, strategically placing tests in the CI/CD architecture, and using techniques to improve the reliability and stability of the test process.

Conclusion

Integrating UI and API testing into CI/CD processes is a key element of the current strategy for accelerating digital product launches. The analysis carried out confirmed that automation of testing, with the correct architecture and methodologically verified coverage, can not only significantly reduce the time spent on software validation and debugging, but also ensure stability, scalability and reproducibility of releases in conditions of high frequency of changes.

Thus, a systematic approach to embedding test practices in CI/CD not only improves the technical performance of development, but also has a direct impact on business results, including reducing time-to-market and increasing end-user satisfaction. The future of research in this area is related to refining metrics of test coverage effectiveness, as well as finding optimal relationships between testing depth and release rate, especially in the context of rapid digital transformation of industries.

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