Effective Strategy & Best Practices of QA in DevOps

DevOps aims at continuous development, testing, improvement, and deployment of software applications in order to cut down on delays in time to market and response to customer queries. In this software development approach every coding segment is tested post development and is followed by integrating the same with the rest of the application. As continuous testing, DevOps forms the crux of this approach, it should be carried out effectively. DevOps testing services include performance, functionality, usability, and security related tests, and post deployment gets monitored on a continuous basis to see whether it performs to its optimal level. A significant aspect of DevOps quality assurance is using automation mainly sourced from the cloud. Automation can quicken the pace of testing besides possessing the ability to check glitches that might be missed during the monotonous rigmarole of manual testing.

Before delving into the best practices to be followed in DevOps quality assurance framework it is important to know the benefits that accrue to the organisation by using the same:

• Brings about a synergy among Development, Testing, and Operations teams by making them function as one unit
• Increased automation in continuous testing DevOps helps in faster detection (and elimination) of glitches
• Ensures faster delivery of software in the market and quicker response to customer queries
• Ensures faster updation of software as per changing market dynamics and shifting of customer preferences
• As stakeholders form part of the planning, development, testing, and deployment exercises in DevOps quality assurance, the overall goal doesn't get shifted
• Greater efficiency among teams leads to cutting down on flab and better realisation of ROI

Best practices to adopt in continuous testing DevOps

DevOps testing services should ensure that any stage of the application development process should be ready for deployment into the next phase. And to let that happen, the following practices are needed to be adhered to as a part of DevOps quality assurance.

Automation and Monitoring: Continuous testing DevOps involves testing of the test environment, strategies, data, tools and execution methods, and with automation leads to greater validation of codes and faster identification of glitches. In fact, any user response gets quickly attended leading to better monitoring of the development process or creating better versions of the product.

Testing on a continuous basis: Every aspect of the SDLC undergo testing on a continuous basis, thus leading to an overall better end product. Here continuous testing DevOps involves the following approaches:

1. Shift left and Shift right: The Shift left process forms a part of continuous integration of software while Shift right comes into being when the coverage area of testing is expanded following feedbacks from users.
2. TDD & BDD: These methods lay down the priorities, requirements, functionalities and risk factors of an application to be developed for all stakeholders. These can be used to generate better and faster automated test cases.
3. Continuous integration: Thanks to continuous testing DevOps, there is quicker as well as continual integration of individual segments into the overall jigsaw of SDLC. This leads to faster time to market and deployment of the application.

Inclusion of non-functional testing: In a traditional testing framework, non-functional testing such as performance, load, usability, etc. is done infrequently as opposed to functional testing due to its longer time requirement. However, in DevOps testing services it is integrated into the continuous test environment by tweaking the CI test process.

Conclusion:

Effective planning of the test environment and implementing proper strategies ensure the success of DevOps testing services.

Michael works for Cigniti Technologies, which is the world's first Independent Software Testing Company to be appraised at CMMI-SVC Level 5, and an ISO 9001:2008 & ISO 27001:2013 certified organization.