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The role and impact of DevOps on testing
In the fast-paced software development environment, collaboration between development and operations teams has undergone a revolutionary transformation with the advent of DevOps. This change has not only streamlined the software delivery process, but has also significantly impacted quality assurance (QA) testing strategies. In this article, we will explore the profound impact of DevOps on QA testing and examine the key strategies that organizations are adopting to ensure both the speed and quality of software releases.
What is DevOps?
DevOps, which stands for Development and Operations, is a collaborative approach that combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) to streamline the software development life cycle(SDLC). Although DevOps focuses primarily on speeding up the software delivery process and improving collaboration between development and operations teams, it also has a significant impact on software testing. DevOps combines the principles of agile development, continuous integration, and continuous delivery to streamline the software development process from programming to deployment. It involves using tools and technologies to automate the testing, deployment and monitoring of software applications, which helps reduce errors, increase efficiency and speed up time needed to release software to market. The DevOps strategy promotes collaborative and iterative working between development and operations teams throughout the software development lifecycle, from planning through testing to deployment. This ensures that the finished product is of superior quality and meets the needs of users.
DevOps – why, what, how and who?
- Why: Increase business benefits by reducing transaction costs associated with implementing incremental changes.
- What (goal): Clarity, consistency, and collaboration to understand the changes each release brings to the IT and customer environment.
- How: Methodology and tools that continue to evolve.
- Who: Programmers, QA and operations team, DevOps engineer.
Key DevOps principles and impact on testing
1. Cooperation
Support of collaboration between development, operations and other stakeholders.
2. Continuous Testing (CT)
Continuous Testing is about testing an application from its initial phase and automating tests throughout the development lifecycle. This helps the team analyze the quality of the product at each stage of the process and allows stakeholders to make informed decisions. CT also reduces the risk of delivering features that break in production, saving the company a significant amount of time, cost and effort. The key is to test as early as possible and find defects as early as possible. Here are a few things to consider when integrating CT into your current testing process:
- Have enough resources
If testing is to be carried out at every stage of the development process, teams must have sufficient resources: hardware, software and skilled engineers. Prior to the introduction of CT, the team will jointly decide on a testing strategy and procure the necessary resources.
- Alignment with Shift-Left
CT aligns with Shift-Left testing, focusing on early testing right from the requirements phase and continuing throughout the development and release process. Part of this alignment is to expose developers and testers to different activities to empower them. For example, the developer should pay more attention to writing better unit tests and testers can be involved in development activities. This helps speed up development cycles and builds cross-functional teams that can adapt to any environment.
- Identify gaps in the existing testing process
Audit your current testing strategy before implementing CT. Gain insight into your current test coverage, the type of testing being performed – manual scripted, automated and exploratory testing. Identify your current bottlenecks, analyze trends in production defects and see how you can mitigate them with CT.
- Use automation wisely
One of the common problems teams encounter when implementing CT is trying to automate everything, even if it doesn’t deliver any value and could prove to be a maintenance nightmare in the long run. For example, automating high-turnover functions could lead to inefficient use of resources as they may spend more time maintaining tests than executing them. Use automation to repeat common tasks, deploy builds to different environments, and perform different kinds of testing that would otherwise be difficult or time-consuming to perform manually.
- Have the right automation tools at your disposal
To implement CT effectively, teams need to invest in using the right tools for different activities. This can include tools for unit testing, UI testing, API testing, performance testing, security testing, and accessibility testing.
3. Continuous Integration (CI)
Continuous Integration (check out also our CI CD article) is a basic DevOps best practice of automating the integration of code changes into a central repository where they are built and run multiple times a day. One of the key benefits of implementing CI is that bugs are quickly discovered and easier to locate. Implementing a CI pipeline brings various benefits to QA:
- Removing dependency on control code inputs
Any number of people can check the code into the version control system multiple times a day. There is no dependency, and each check-in has timestamps to know exactly who wrote the code and pushed it to a specific branch (branching). This means that both testers and developers can write application and automation code and check it into different branches without any interference.
- Faster feedback
Once the code is checked in, tests are automatically run to get quick feedback on the build so that bugs can be found quickly and fixed as soon as possible. This allows testers to quickly find out what the problem is, report it, and take the necessary actions to address and fix the bug.
- Increased cooperation
CI improves overall engineering communication and accountability, enabling better collaboration between development, testing, and operations across the DevOps team. Pull requests are linked to the CI process, which helps gain insight into the code from other team members. This allows developers and testers to collaborate on feature branches as the feature progresses through the CI pipeline. Automated tests must follow the same pull request process.
- Automated regression testing
As part of the CI process, testers configure regression tests to run automatically when the build is deployed to different environments. This ensures that new changes do not break existing functionality. These tests are set to run as quickly as possible to get faster feedback on the deployment.
- Extensive documentation
As automated tests are run at each stage of the CI pipeline, extensive logs are generated with time markers for future use. This is especially useful for organizations that must maintain regulatory compliance. The logs serve as a rich source of information during routine audits to ensure that policies and procedures are not being violated.
4. Continuous Delivery (CD)
One of the integral parts of DevOps is rapid feature delivery. Continuous Delivery (check out also our article about CI CD) enables this by giving teams the ability to release an application at any point in time. In addition to passing automated tests (read about automation testing tools for efficient automation), the application must have all the configurations necessary to deploy it to production. The CD covers everything from idea to build to production readiness. QA’s role in the CD pipeline is to ensure continuous testing throughout the development process. Testers use a variety of tools for smoke testing, regression testing, API testing, UI testing, performance and security testing. The tools free up their time for exploratory and risk-based testing to mitigate identified risks. The CI environment also provides automated checks at various stages of the build process, providing faster feedback on feature quality.
The role of QA in DevOps
In other types of agile approach, the developer is in charge of coding, creating the feature, writing and running unit tests, and testers perform automated and manual tests of the feature. DevOps deliberately blurs the lines between these split roles and forces collaboration. Developers start to build a mentality of constantly checking for bugs in their code. Testers increase their responsibility from validating the application to ensuring it is deployable at all times. They can even patch code as needed. All of these parts work together to ensure rapid feature delivery. Customer focus drives the work of the entire team. A high level of collaboration between developers, testers, and the operations team allows testers to monitor the application in production and use the data to help stakeholders make decisions.
Integrating QA into DevOps
Here are a few ways to integrate QA – quality assurance into a DevOps environment:
- Change in team structure
First, organizations should remove the boundaries between developers, QA, and operations teams. This would involve restructuring the existing QA team to align with DevOps goals. The teams need to merge into a single technical team that will focus on different activities in order to deliver features on time. These technical teams need to communicate, collaborate, and optimize their efforts in order to quickly find bugs and fix them before deployment. Also, testers should be involved early in the development process, starting with the requirements phase (where they can clarify any ambiguities in the requirements) by ensuring that the entire team is clear on how the feature will be developed, tested, deployed, and monitored post-launch. Ongoing testing becomes part of everyone’s responsibility.
- Automate as much as possible
Second, DevOps and automation go hand in hand – without one, the other won’t work. This is where people and tools can help in delivering shorter and more reliable release cycles. Testers play an integral role in the DevOps process by starting automation at the beginning of the process, which ensures that bugs are found sooner rather than later.
- Use metrics to track progress
Another important factor determining the success of integrating QA into the DevOps process is having metrics that can quantify value. Read more about the QA metrics needed to deliver a quality product in our last article.
- Parallel test execution
Testers run tests in parallel with various activities in the DevOps process. For parallel testing to be effective, they must create standardized test environments and have sufficient hardware and software resources to run many tests as quickly as possible.
- Continuous monitoring
DevOps encompasses multiple tools, processes, automated tests, and environments. Data is gathered from different phases of the development process and analysed to ensure that the system always performs at an optimal level. The operations team typically works with developers and testers to build monitoring and analysis features directly into the application under development. It is essential that testers know how to use tools such as Splunk, Kibana, Graphite and Firebase that are used for this purpose to support the operations team.
- Have a common set of processes and tools
One of the biggest problems in organizations is that each team follows a different process and uses a different set of tools to accomplish the same task. When this goes unnoticed, it leads to an unnecessary waste of cost, time and effort for the organization. In DevOps, teams need to come together to agree on a common set of processes and tools that everyone will follow. Once the decision is made, each team member will know what process to follow and what tools to use at any given point in the development process.
- Ongoing feedback
Organizations must emphasize the importance of obtaining ongoing feedback from the team during implementation. Daily stand ups, team meetings, retrospective meetings and planning meetings are great examples of liaison points for soliciting feedback. Based on this, teams adjust their approach for the next iteration. This continuous cycle of build->measure->learn (validated learning) helps improve the DevOps process.
- Increased visibility of tasks and processes
To successfully implement DevOps, teams need to collaborate and have visibility in their work. At all times, teams should be able to visually see the progress of the development process. Organizations can use tools and dashboards that highlight important metrics such as team velocity, bugs logged/removed, number of tests executed, test coverage and other metrics important to the team.
- Sufficient training
The skills of testers must be adapted to the DevOps process. This starts with training everyone on full-stack test automation, which includes writing automated tests such as unit tests, API tests, UI tests, and back-end tests. Manual testing will still be relevant, but the focus will shift from purely manual test case execution to performing risk-based and exploratory testing. This will be done in parallel with automated tests. Finally, to successfully transition to DevOps, organizations should put in place the three core processes we described above in the key DevOps principles. You can also take advantage of Azure DevOps. Azure DevOps is a set of services that can be used to implement DevOps practices. It provides a range of tools for continuous integration, continuous product delivery, version control, and health monitoring. Read our article on the future of software testing – QA Ops.
Benefits of DevOps for QA testing
- The development team and the QA team can collaborate more effectively. This will help create a supportive atmosphere within the organization.
- You can bring the final product to market faster.
- It is possible to release regular versions and continuously introduce frequent updates.
- Final products will be more stable thanks to better quality control standards.
- You can benefit from automation in several ways. For example, you’ll achieve long-term cost reductions and faster error detection.
How is DevOps changing the role of traditional software testers?
The advent of DevOps has changed the way software development and testing is approached and as a result has affected the role of traditional software testers in the following ways:
1. More collaboration and cross-functional involvement
With DevOps, the importance of coordination between development and operations teams has increased. This means that software testers are no longer just responsible for testing, but also for working with developers to ensure that code is properly tested before deployment.
2. Increased emphasis on automation
Automation is a key component of DevOps, which uses it to improve the software delivery process. This means that software testers will need to better understand test automation tools and know how to implement them effectively.
3. Greater involvement in the software development lifecycle
Thanks to DevOps, software testing is no longer just a separate phase that occurs after development is complete. Instead, it is integrated into the entire software development lifecycle and software testers will need to be involved in the planning, design, development and deployment phases.
4. More emphasis on continuous testing
DevOps involves continuous integration and delivery, which means that software is released in smaller, more frequent increments. To ensure that new features and updates are thoroughly tested before deployment, software testers must perform continuous testing.
5. More emphasis on soft skills
DevOps puts more emphasis on collaboration, communication and teamwork. This means that software testers will need to have strong communication and interpersonal skills in order to work effectively with cross-functional teams.
Conclusion
We hope we’ve answered the question “what is DevOps”. The impact of DevOps on quality assurance testing strategies is transformational. By adopting a culture of collaboration, automation, and continuous testing, organizations can achieve a delicate balance between speed and quality in software development. Testing teams play a key role in this change, contributing to the creation of resilient, reliable, and quality software in a dynamic DevOps environment. As organizations continue to evolve, integrating DevOps principles into QA testing strategies will be critical to staying competitive.
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