Improve Testing Collaboration with Enhanced Branching and Version Control

DevOps is designed to unlock faster, higher quality software development through best practices that help developers continuously build, experiment, and collaborate on new code. But as useful as practices like branching, conflict resolution, and peer review are when accelerating product velocity, they have remained almost exclusive to those with coding experience. Limitations imposed by code-heavy development and test automation tools have created inefficient silos that inhibit quality teams and developers from working together to build iterative development pipelines that produce high-quality software. 

Today, mabl is breaking those silos by introducing enhanced branching, merging and conflict resolution, and peer review capabilities to help quality teams adopt DevOps best practices for testing. Regardless of coding experience, anyone engaged in automated testing can create new test branches, resolve conflicting versions of the main and branched tests, and participate in peer reviews through mabl’s intuitive, low-code interface. Making it even easier for quality teams, developers, and business users to collaborate on software development and continuously improve product quality. 

Branching, merging, and peer review are some of the keys to a disciplined CI/CD pipeline that enable development teams to manage multiple projects at once, bringing DevOps practices full circle as new features are introduced, tested, and improved over time. With an effective branching strategy, developers are able to create new features, implement bug fixes, and introduce product improvements without interfering with each other’s work. Once a new feature or fix is ready to be merged into the main product, conflict resolution ensures that changes on main aren’t overwritten and can be safely pulled into the development version, while peer review allows developers to provide feedback on others’ work. 

Empowering Software Testers with Low-Code Test Branching, Version Control, and Peer Review

Mabl's new collaborative testing capabilities allow the full software team to adopt branching best practices with the help of low-code, intelligent test automation. Similar to how developers use branching to enable continuous development pipelines, testing teams can now use mabl to adopt branching into their testing strategy:

• Create new branches: team members can make changes to a test or flow without impacting the main version (or master). Mabl users can work in parallel on the same set of tests or flows, such as when a test is being updated or created for a new feature in development.
• Merging and conflict resolution: helps teams unify disparate versions of the same test when multiple team members have contributed to it. Mabl users can easily resolve different variations of a test or flow to include in the final version. 
• Test review workflows: users can easily collaborate by providing comments and feedback to specific test versions that ultimately help improve test reliability and the speed of output.

Supporting DevOps and Quality Engineering Adoption

Technology companies are navigating talent shortages, turbulent economic times, and high consumer expectations for digital experiences. As a result, demand for successful DevOps adoption is growing rapidly with an increased focus on quick results. The relationship between scaling software testing and DevOps adoption is clear: the better testers and developers collaborate, the more likely it is that they’ll see DevOps success. Mabl’s new enhanced branching, merging and conflict resolution, and peer review capabilities empower everyone - regardless of coding experience - to embrace DevOps best practices and extend them to testing for better applications and more collaborative teams.