Impact of DevOps on Software Testing
“Without change there is no innovation, creativity, or incentive for improvement. Those who initiate change will have a better opportunity to manage the change that is inevitable.” - William Pollard
DevOps is about culture, people, process and technology. The mindset is very important to understand by moving away from traditional ‘waterfall’ methodology and adopting agile principles and techniques. The goal is set, which is “Bringing application, functionalities and features very quickly to the market”. Means on the other hand the development process is moving rapidly and releasing code at a large volume on frequent time basis. Without automation across the development, testing and release cycle the goals can not be achieved.
All processes, phases, activities, but also tools, which play an active role during the software development and delivery should enable to shift left to enable a higher pace.
Looking at the current ratio of manual testing within software development projects, it still dominates the testing phase compared to test automation. The challenge adopting DevOps is changing the way most of the software development projects practice testing phases. Shift left doesn’t mean to continue exactly the same the way things were done before, furthermore also drive change to explore new opportunities enabling a higher pace in delivery. It is all about change, manual tester may need to adopt other testing techniques to deliver the mindset of DevOps. Behavior Driven Development and Testing is one approach to test automation with a low cost of translation.
Maybe manual testers need to evolve into a mix of test automation engineer and subject matter experts? On the other hand, maybe test automation need to evolve as well as it is practiced today?
Attached a short presentation with some ideas on the impact of software testing and solution recommendations.
