DevOps is here to stay!!

Testing will be a vital part of this new mindset by presenting changes and new challenges in the software testing arena. DevOps is the amalgamation of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increase the ability of an organization to deliver applications and services at a higher velocity compared to traditional delivery models.

One of its principal concepts is continuity. A DevOps team need to do continuous planning, integrations, and deliveries, which means going into production continuously.

How to integrate QA into the DevOps context? 

The principal aim is that, at some point within the software testing lifecycle, we stop being only testers, creating & executing test cases and act as consultants of the whole team.

This change of role implies the generation of several challenges:

1.   ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE

To work with integrated teams, there should be a constant encouragement and thrust to different teams (testing, development, operations etc.) to work towards a level of maturity that will come with effort, time, and practice, to eventually become a self-managed team.

2.   MINDSET CHANGE

All the stakeholders, testing team, development team, operations team etc, must be committed to work in an integrated manner. Although we may have different roles and responsibilities, we must set a mindset that all of us are a single team and the commitment of the integration must be undisputed; this may reduce the conventional way of playing the blame game.

3.   PROCESS CHANGE

Smooth transition is an utmost important aspect while moving on from linear process of working towards continuous and collaborative work style. This can be achieved by having a testing team with adequate maturity and skill to propose a change of direction at the time of continuous integration.

4.   APPROPRIATE METRICS IMPLEMENTATION

It is crucial to apply the appropriate metrics during respective stages of continuous integration for better progress tracking. Appropriate metrics should be in place which can accommodate varied set of continuous integration statistics across multiple teams and engender a single view for the stakeholders. Metrics can be related to the number of bugs found, the number of bugs per severity, etc., but we must measure other parameters which can define criteria for failure or success:

Ø How effective is the automated regression suite?

Ø What is the effectiveness of automation in each release?

Ø Are the correct bugs identified?

Ø How many continuous builds have failed or succeeded?

5.   NEW KNOWLEDGE ACQUIREMENT AND SKILLS DEVELOPMENT

This is one of the biggest challenge in the world of testing in the context of continuity and DevOps. We need to adapt ourselves to continuous software deliveries and test executions. Because of this, testers, developers and members of the integrated team must learn to work with cross skills which can provide results to the integrated team. For example, the tester should know a little bit about performance, something about programming, and how to use an automation tool. However, one of the most important challenge is to keep up with the skills that a tester must have and be a person who learns and applies tools and concepts of testing.

WHAT TYPES OF TESTS CAN BE APPLIED WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF DEVOPS?

There are multiple testing processes in the DevOps context:

The foremost concept of all this is that we must know that everything that can be automated has to be automated. Do we need to automate everything? Not really. Not everything is automated OR can be automated, but automation is a crucial aspect within the concept of DevOps.

Software testing is conceptual. This process within DevOps depends on the context of the organizations, and with the automation of everything that can be automated, the testers have even more time to do exploratory testing to find risky and tricky bugs. The critical spirit of exploratory testing must remain as a core factor within the continuous context.

TO SUM UP

To work in a DevOps context, a collaborative environment must be created for everyone to work as consultants, which require both social and soft skills and everyone need to be proactive, curious, and up to date with new testing technologies.

To achieve this, team mindset and the way of thinking must be changed, and this not only applies to the testers but to the rest of the team members as well. The implementation of DevOps practices does not represent the end of software testing but an evolution.