What is QAOPS?

From the past so many years, we are hearing the term Devops and its offshoots DevSecops , data Ops and net Ops and these days QA Ops is gaining popularity and bringing in a new aroma to Devops.

So, what is QAOPS?

As per the definition, it is a set of software development principles that emphasizes collaboration, communication, and automation among all stakeholders, including IT operations, testers, developers, customers, and security personnel from the inception of a project till the end. But practically it is a set of principles that enables the team to test early and test continuously. Following is one of the best depictions of continuous testing by Dan Ashby which clearly states that testing fits in each point in the product journey and it is pervasive in all the phases of software lifecycle.

Let’s walk into some of the paths where testers hesitate to travel. In the most common ways of working, testing team gets involved once story is developed and the code is deployed in the QA environment but essentially they should be involved from the time the design is discussed and finalized, prototype is developed, and the initial discussions are kickstarted so that they can find design flaws or validate the acceptance criteria by their questioning skills. This will also help testers to understand the product better and design the test cases accordingly. Not only that but they can also understand their customers better. There are so many things that a tester can do even if a single piece of code is not written.

As the project moves ahead from design to development, testing team start working on designing test cases and creating automated test. At this point, it is very important to not only think about unit test, API and functional test but also performance, security and other NFRS. Test framework should be capable enough to mock features to perform integration test ahead of the complete feature is developed. Parallel testing and test scalability are the two very important factor that accelerate the automation. This is the key stage where code goes through various quality gates in the continuous integrated environment before it reaches production. How well and fast this entire process is done determines the Devops maturity. 

Testing job is not over with the clean build, zero defects, successful deployment to production. But as a tester we should continue to monitor the production logs, understand, and analyze how our customers are using the applications, what part of the application is used more often, what time is the peak, how much is the peak. what are the bottlenecks and so on? There is so much to learn from the logs. This analysis helps us to modify our regression test cases better and helps in optimizing the existing test suite. 

Hence testing is not a phase in the beginning, middle or the end instead it is all over and is constantly evolving and QAOps aims to lay the principles that helps to build better products in a much faster pace.