The CIViT Model in a Nutshell: Visualizing Testing Activities to Support Continuous Integration

Nowadays, innovations in many products ranging from customer electronics to high-end industry electric/electronic components are driven by software. Thus, new or extended features to software and mechatronic products can be realized and deployed to the market much faster. While the use of software enables an enormous flexibility, mastering the ever-growing complexity of the resulting products to meet the quality goals required for the market is getting more and more challenging. Continuous development combined with continuous testing is a successful method that actively incorporates the customer to get feedback for the feature to be deployed early, and thus, product owners, developers, and testers can collaborate more effectively to meet the market’s needs. From literature, setting up such an agile development process is clear; the individual situation in terms of organization, processes, and development and test tooling however is depending on the company—many of the aforementioned aspects have grown over the years and cannot be easily changed. In this article, we present the CIViT model, which allows companies to get an explicit understanding and overview of their current testing and integration activities. With CIViT’s intuitive representation of the current status, companies are able to identify bottlenecks and derive actions points to evolve their processes, methods, and development and test tooling towards a more agile and continuous deployment-oriented organization. Thus, they will be able to develop, integrate, evaluate, and deploy new features faster to the end user, hence strengthening their own market position