Introduction to How To Create DevOps Testing Culture
DevOps represents a culture and a concept to bring together otherwise divided disciplines of development and operations to deliver a better software product for enterprise purposes in a quicker time.
DevOps boasts a more agile process focused on shorter development span and enhanced efficiency. In a DevOps development environment several processes ranging from the designers, programmers, QA testing and analysis, product engineers, and operations experts are integrated and a single collaborative team is created to create a value-based product guaranteeing faster development and improved performance.
In DevOps, simultaneously 4 key processes run concurrently continuously. Here we mention them below:
- Continuous Integration
- Continuous Delivery
- Continuous Testing
- Continuous Monitoring
The Role of Continuous Testing in DevOps
In DevOps agile environment, the testing doesn’t stay waiting to play its role at the end of the development process.
But rather it is brought at the very beginning of the product development cycle and is carried out throughout the project.
As soon as the developers and system engineers finish coding and get it ready for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery, Continuous Testing and evaluation process is turned on to validate the code by seeing the functions and performance.
Naturally, the testing team has to Integrate their testing tools and test automation approach with the DevOps environment for the continuous testing process.
Here the testing is continuously carried out not just to ensure the performance of the code but also to make sure that the changes in the code don’t break the product.
An organization can fully automate the entire process starting from the integration, testing, delivery, and monitoring. This fundamental role of concurrent testing in DevOps actually ensures faster product development.
How to Build A Proper DevOps Testing Culture: 3 Ways to Consider
Building the Foundation Right
The first and biggest challenge is to make the fundamental right for the DevOps testing culture by preparing the skill set and the participant testing professionals. This involves ensuring the skills of your Quality Assurance (QA) team.
The QA testing team is not only responsible for conducting the automated testing but also for the app building process and the way the testing process makes value addition to the app quality. This is why the QA testers should have a clear idea about the continuous integration process.
Ensuring Teamwork
DevOps process focuses on competence by reducing inconsistencies that occur due to redundancy, delays, and dependencies.
Test automation allows robust and coordinated teamwork in the DevOps environment. It ensures in-time feedback generation to take efficient measures to address shortcomings.
This overall measure makes the process more efficient. Testers are expected to share the responsibility of streamlining automation and supporting it right from the very start.
Driving Continuous Innovation
Finally, in a DevOps environment, it is a compulsion to drive continuous innovation. Helping the team members to try and come with better and more effective practices for the testing automation should be a focus area.
Enhancing the technical skills of the testers and helping them to come with new and innovative measures is another responsibility of the project leadership.
This also requires creating more space and time within the workplace and work, to give employees the impetus to work harder and deliver better results.
Besides, rewarding people for the completed jobs, offering some motivation for new skill learning will also work great.
Perfect Strategy for DevOps Testing
DevOps Testing Strategy
The DevOps environment for the projects of a company is likely to have a far-reaching and robust impact on the management and control strategies.
Without a strategy that supervises each and every aspect of the testing process, it is really next to impossible to automate all things in a process.
On the other hand, an automation strategy is required to generate maximum ROI from the project. A good testing strategy is also crucial for faster development and for creating more room for the team to concentrate on other essential tasks.
So, we need to spare some words on various perfect DevOps testing strategies. Well, as per the experience of most successful DevOps projects, we have picked here the below-mentioned testing strategies as the most efficient ones.
Pick Up the Right Cases for Automation
It is important to know the cases you can choose for automation. Testing automation cases vary from tests with repetitive testing tasks to tests for high-risk projects to testing large data sets and carrying out tests on various environments and browsers.
Obviously, you need to pick the right automation test case based on the app you are building, the skills and abilities of your team members, and a few other factors.
Automating the testing for the chosen cases and incorporate the output into the development process for a great result is your ultimate goal
Implementing Automation Right from the Start
In the DevOps environment faster development and quicker completion of all processes is only achieved through concurrently running development and testing processes.
This is why it is incredibly crucial for the project to start the QA process as early as possible. Some tests like the keyword-based ones should be written in advance and way before the functions are built just because they need correlation.
As soon as the code is available in the DevOps environment, the automation unit testing gets ready to take action by making the testing script ready.
Applying Automated Cases
Any case built by the testers can actually prove to be irrelevant for the purpose or just maybe felt complicated for it. Such tests are often needed to be replaced by other tests.
This is also one of the reasons why flexible and automated testing cases are often used. As for making the testing strategy successful, you need to write small testing cases without really putting a lot of coding load. A better strategy is to break the apps into smaller stages and steps to evaluate them.
Conclusion
DevOps has emerged as a promising environment for enterprise software and app development because of the agile approach of concurrent testing.
The continuous testing culture of DevOps is highly effective to curb the development time without really compromising on quality and performance.
Author Bio:
Yakshit Bose is the Senior Developer at leading Custom WordPress Development Services Company CMARIX Technolabs Pvt. Ltd. He is an experienced, WordPress developer. He likes to share his thoughts on Web development, CMS development, and Technology News.
