Automation enabling DevOps+Agile business strategy

In the competitive digital economy, speed to market has become inevitable and highly sought after. As speed becomes a business imperative, restrictive and lengthy software development cycles are no longer useful in business environments. Users can abandon any application at any point of time and the consequent poor customer experience can affect a brand. This makes agile test automation crucial to attaining quality and speed. The agile testing strategy has fortified digital business practices while allowing stakeholders -from business analysts to testers, align to their business goals and remain flexible.

Enterprises are looking at expediting digital transformation and keeping pace with innovation. They are going about it without making compromises on the stability of their core business processes. The main aspect of that transformation includes deploying new services in dynamic corporate environments where lines of business expect fast results. DevOps approach has already demonstrated its mettle in offering rapid delivery solutions in meeting emerging business requirements for new applications and services. Hence, high-performing IT enterprises are increasingly adopting the DevOps approach.

According to a survey, enterprises following DevOps methodology come across 60X fewer failures in service delivery and recoup 168X faster than their poor-performing peers. According to Gartner, by the year 2020, fifty percent of customers would dismantle TCoEs (Test centers of Excellence) as they radically shift towards adopting the Agile testing strategy.

Evolution of automation and QA in DevOps and agile business environment:

Automation plays a pivotal role in every successful DevOps transformation comprising secure environments, constant builds, testing processes, and faster releases. Automation helps make the release process more stable while bridging the gap between production and deployment. According to a survey, 80% of DevOps-driven user experience challenges happen due to lack of automation. Therefore, for the next-gen businesses, factors like enhanced speed of application deployment, increased security, and minimized downtime are the priorities to implement automation.

In the present business environment, the software delivery process moves faster than ever. This happens thanks to the combined approaches of continuous delivery and agile methodology. Continuous delivery is an outcome of agile practices that brings more value to the clients. In the continuous delivery method, the role of DevOps QA has evolved to include entire stages of project development such as release planning and management, requirement analysis, server admin and DevOps security testing, and performance testing. Continuous delivery requires a "shift left" approach to DevOps Quality assurance and plays a pivotal role in design, discovery, and estimation.

How DevOps and automation promote an agile business environment and a collaborative culture:

DevOps testing services do not merely offer a direction that a company must follow, rather it offers every IT enterprise the ability to stand out from the peers. According to a survey by Gartner, agile enterprise development and DevOps would have a vital impact on enterprises. Here is an outline of the advanced business advantages that DevOps brings to the organization:

• Expedite application delivery through agile: DevOps offers rigorous development, testing, and delivery of software. According to the traditional procedure of software release, the development teams first create the code and then tests it in an entirely isolated environment, wherein the operations team takes charge for production. Thus, the lack of synchronization between the two teams creates multiple complexities as they do not follow the same configuration, infrastructure, deployment, performance monitoring, and log management, which eventually slows down the production process.
• However, with the help of DevOps test automation, organizations can expedite delivery and minimize the release time. It helps enterprises to go to the market faster and stay ahead of the competition. DevOps with agile testing strategy also helps in the early detection of errors and offers quick fixes. Overall, DevOps, with the help of automation, assists organizations to concentrate more on innovation with more stable operating environments.

• Enhanced application reliability: Automation enhances application reliability due to less manual intervention. QA processes and test automation taking place in every stage offers more control to the development team to have an infallible DevOps QA approach. DevOps tools help automate the delivery pipeline thereby enabling teams to minimize the challenges of configuration management, version control, continuous integration, continuous performance monitoring, and deployment. This enhances the quality of the application as it removes the cumbersome, time-consuming and error-prone manual processes. Therefore, with the incorporation of automation, teams can create, package, and deploy with much more accuracy and ease. It successfully shortens the lead time and enhances the time to recovery with much lesser downtime and failure rates.

• Superior build quality: DevOps approach combines both ops-centric and dev-centric attributes such as performance, maintainability, deployability, and reusability to enhance the code quality.

Conclusion

DevOps test automation offers an all-round enhancement in the quality of software. Many organizations are now looking at improving the infrastructure with backups, one-click deployment, and pipeline automation. DevOps, with the help of automation, helps organizations to become more efficient and agile.

Diya works for Cigniti Technologies, Global Leaders in Independent Software Testing Services Company to be appraised at Cmmi-Svc v1.3, Maturity Level 5, and is also Iso 9001:2015 & Iso 27001:2013 certified.