According to a recent RightScale poll, 54% of firms have embraced DevOps, and interest in DevOps is growing quickly.
This article explains how this new Software Development technique will affect QA and how the QA function as a whole should develop to accommodate this shift.
Define DevOps
DevOps is a Software Development technique that aims to integrate all Software Development tasks, from development through operations, inside the same development cycle.
This requires a greater degree of coordination between the many stakeholders in the software development process (particularly Development, Quality Assurance, and Operations).
A perfect DevOps cycle would begin with:
- Developer writing code
- Constructing and delivering binaries in a testing environment
- Executing test cases and Deploying to Production in a single, streamlined operation.
- Clearly, this strategy prioritizes the automation of Build, Deployment, and Testing. In a DevOps cycle, Continuous Integration (CI) and Automation Testing technologies become the standard.
Why use DevOps?
Although there are small distinctions between Agile Testing and DevOps Testing, individuals who have experience with Agile will find DevOps to be somewhat more intuitive (and eventually adopt). While Agile concepts are effectively implemented in the development and quality assurance cycles, it is an entirely different story (and sometimes a source of dispute) on the operations side. DevOps proposes to address this issue.
Instead of Continuous Integration, DevOps uses “Continuous Development,” where code is developed, delivered, tested, and installed on the Production environment, which is then ready for end-user consumption.
Standardized settings and processes assist the whole supply chain. It’s all automatic. All stakeholders may concentrate on designing and coding a high-quality product without worrying about construction, operations, and quality assurance.
It decreases time-to-live from code creation to end-user consumption to three to four hours.
Changed Function Of QA
Traditionally, in DevOps, QA would get a build that was deployed in their assigned environment, and they would then begin Functional and Regression testing. Ideally, the build would sit with QA for a number of days before receiving approval. DevOps modifies each of these phases.
QA modifications for DevOps Testing:
- QA must coordinate their activities inside the DevOps cycle.
- They must ensure that all test cases are automated, and code coverage is close to one hundred percent.
- They must ensure that their environments are standardized and that deployment is automated on their QA machines.
- All pre-testing, cleaning, and post-testing chores, as well as other tasks, are automated and aligned with the Continuous Integration cycle.
DevOps requires cross-department coordination across the delivery chain. This makes the boundaries between chain contributors’ functions porous.
DevOps encourages everyone’s participation. Developers may coordinate deployments. Deployment engineers may contribute test cases for QA. QA Engineers may incorporate test automation into DevOps.
Everyone in the chain is responsible for the quality and on-time delivery.
DevOps and Automated Testing
To achieve such speed and agility, it is essential to automate and set all testing procedures to execute automatically when the deployment is complete in the QA environment. To accomplish this integration, specialized Automation Testing techniques and continuous integration technologies are used.
This also needs the development of a sophisticated Automation Testing framework via which new test cases may be rapidly scripted.
Conclusion
DevOps represents the future. Software development paradigms are sometimes subjected to a cycle of continual improvement. You must accept, comprehend, and inculcate it.
Your automation initiatives must deliver value to the supply chain and be agile enough to adapt quickly to changes. Before production deployment, you may work on alpha, beta, and UAT environments.
The premise remains. DevOps success depends on automation. QAs should know how much automation is too much.
If you are interested in implementing DevOps and the related Test Approach in your business, please contact https://u-tor.com/.
