What is DevOps?
DevOps is a group of activities that integrate software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) to decrease the life cycle of systems development. The combination of practices, tools, and cultural philosophies are also defined as DevOps. It improves the organization’s ability to deliver applications and services faster than companies using conventional technology management and software engineering processes. Their speed allows companies to provide better service to their customers and help them stay ahead in the competition.
How DevOps Model Works?
The development and operational team are no longer “siloed” under the DevOps model. Sometimes, both the teams are treated as a single team where engineers work on the complete lifecycle of the application. Their complete process includes development, testing, operations implementation, and gaining a set of skills that may not be a part of a single function.
Some DevOps models are designed to align quality assurance and security management teams with development and operations but across the program’s lifecycle.
Security is the concern for everyone in the DevOps team, referred to as DevSecOps. With DevOps, teams use a technology stack and resources to build and run the software quickly and efficiently. They use various methods for the process of test automation and use special tools to help engineers manage independent tasks. For example – deploying code, provisioning infrastructure might need assistance from other departments, and to do so further.
What Does DevOps do with Quality Assurance?
When it comes to producing software and managing a big project, three options always confuse everyone, which is the best approach for a team – Waterfall, Agile, DevOps.
If we talk about the project management programs, everything is clear that the project is managed through effective collaboration. Yet, one can not give a guarantee of quality work and on-time delivery with software alone. Inappropriate measures to use software and failure leads to poor quality.
Let’s understand Why today, DevOps are more demanding over waterfall models.
The waterfall is the most traditional project management technique. It is used to break down the project related activities into linear sequential phases, where each stage relies on the previous deliverables of phases. Due to much dependency, the process is so time-consuming.
The idea of water project management started in the 1940s and gained popularity in the 1950s, mainly in the manufacturing and construction industries.
Challenges occur with waterfall are as follows:
- Customer expectations are hard to meet.
- Teams work with a silos mentality.
- Introduce score creep in project management.
DevOps is trendy on the block for project deliveries that we also call a merger of development and operations. It uses what’s unique in Agile and expands on that with the following main differences:
- Continuous delivery.
- Developers and operations collaboration.
DevOps allows you to expand your core team, including the operation team. There is no limitation for the project; it facilitates continuous improvement based on feedback from other groups. The advanced DevOps allows the team to include security teams as a part of the core group to build DevSecOps.
The second most powerful weapon or component of DevOps is automation, where all possible features can be automated. Factors like network resources, communication, testing, code deployment, and scaling help meet customer demands.
When DevOps performs through automation, You can quickly improve the entire team’s overall productivity and avoid inevitable human errors.
Using test automation, you can enhance DevOps’ strategy and achieve agility and speed for customers. Its objective is to move to a continuous delivery model. There is no need to wait for years for a single big update.
DevOps is the customer-centric model that helps cross-functional teams optimize the customer experience and give ease to deliver thousands of small updates every day. It is similar to Agile. It is better to implement the DevOps model, One must choose the software testing companies with a good skillset, mindset, and a certified group of people to take the business to new heights.
In DevOps, every test performs with continuity as software test automation uses advanced tools to execute, control the criteria, and compare the actual results against the expected ones. In general, tests that are performed on the bases of repetition or regressions tests are automated. Whenever it comes to delivering the project on-time, test automation ensures success for DevOps.
DevOps can never grow in the market if they run a large number of test cases manually.
The Role of QA in the World of DevOps
Why the QA is integral to DevOps – the answer is justified here. With DevOps, quality is ensured throughout the testing, delivery cycle, and both the development and testing teams take responsibility to provide it.
The good thing about QA for DevOps is it helps to release code on a continuous basis. The purpose of its quality is not limited to killing the bug, yet it takes care to present the best thing into the overall release of the application.
Test automation is not like a robot, if you think that works automatically or builds the application on its own. For this, an experienced agile developer or tester is required to build out quality-made test cases. The other benefit of including test automation to DevOps is it allows us to work with outside experts, and you can easily manage the complete setup with them.
Of course, test automation has become a secret player for DevOps success. Still, it demands excellent skills to handle technical and complex DevOps projects.
Fortunately, there are a lot of guides available online to learn test automation. You can become prolific in this field by self-learning and determination. But you also have the option of enrolling in test automation courses.
Test automation engineers must be proficient in executing the application functionality.
They must have a good understanding of the underlying technical landscape. Several scripts are implemented with the help of CI/CD tools. Therefore, it is necessary for them to understand it very well and collaborate with both the operational and development teams.
Always hire a qualified test engineer with a vast range of resources. They should be okay with working all business verticals. Providing retraining to existing testers and switching it to test automation can consume so much time.
Always choose the professional with the right skills; only that is the key to accomplish your business goals.
What is CI/CD in DevOps?
The CI/CD pipeline is the best practice for the DevOps team. It is a method that helps to implement new changes and deliver the project to customers in a tight deadline. The stages of automation are introduced to clients during app development.
The main concepts under the CI/CD are continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment. CI/CD is the only and one solution to solve all problems that occur during the integration of new codes. If the DevOps doesn’t take CI/CD seriously, it can put their development and operations to hell.
CI (Continuous Integration) is a set of practices and a coding philosophy that pushes development teams to make small changes frequently in codes. As modern applications provide compatibility for different platforms, that means the same app can run on distinct browsers and operating systems.
Due to the specific need for every project, CI (Continuous Integration) is taken into account and to validate the changes. The technical purpose of CI is to offer consistency to teams and an automated way to create package and test applications.
During the integration process with consistency, software development teams commit to deliver as which the user demands. As a result, it regards better collaboration and software quality. However, continuous delivery starts when continuous integration ends. The goal of the CD is to automate the delivery of applications to the desired infrastructure environment.
Most team members work with multiple environments other than the production, like development and testing conditions. Continuous Delivery (CD) ensures that there is the best automated way to make instant changes in codes. Ongoing automation and continuous monitoring are the plus points in CI/CD, providing throughout the application lifecycle.
From the integration, testing phases to delivery and deployment, all the things are combined together in CI/CD, and these interlinked connections are always called a CI/CD pipeline. It supports Development and operational teams for working together in an agile way with either site reliability engineering (SRE) approach or DevOps.
Most CI/CD tools are available for DevOps to fulfill the on-demand needs and implement continuous testing with the development. Automation is followed in each step of release processes and helps deploy the changes automatically; that means no manual intervention is required for the production. CI/CD tools assist in defining a proper schedule for all market segments. The business benefits of CI/CD are reduced cost, increased accountability and team transparency, customer satisfaction, smaller backlog, faster release rate, faster mean time to resolution (MTTR), and more test reliability.
DevOps testing divides the entire lifecycle of software development and delivery. Testers can be involved in performance testing, security testing, and operational testing. Even, it gives much ease to analyze and monitor the logs and production data.
Best Ways to Make Test Automation Strategy Meaningful with DevOps
- Understand the user environment for your application.
- Combine management and technical experience.
- Hire a dedicated team of testers for test automation.
- Encourage the cultural shift.
Types of Automation Testing Keep in Mind
- Unit Testing – Unit tests validate single functions, modules, or classes of your applications.
- Acceptance Testing – Automated acceptance tests allow us to validate features and give applications benefits to clients.
- Integration Service Testing – Verify your application interface and its end-to-end service flows.
- Performance and Stress Testing – It is the most crucial test that you have to consider in automation. It validates how the services work with expected and unexpected client loads.
- Non-functional Testing – Non-functional tests help to verify security, capacity, availability, and scalability.
All-in-all, we can say that the key to DevOps success is test automation.
About the Guest Author
Claire Mackerras, is a Senior QA Engineer & Editor associated with Bugraptors specialized in quality assurance services. She is passionate about writing on technological trends for manual & automation software testing.