#devops qa

Traditional QA is woefully short in tackling the challenges of modern software applications. This is due to the fact that today’s software applications have interfaces with several digital elements and third-party sites to function and deliver the right outcomes. And to ensure that they do so seamlessly, DevOps QA must replace traditional QA.

So, why did DevOps QA slowly assume salience in the new digital scheme of things?

In a traditional software development lifecycle, QA exists as a distinct group along with Dev. It has different job roles, responsibilities, and management. The bottom line, both Dev and QA exist as separate entities catering to different objectives. However, from the operations perspective, both development and QA are considered to be part of the same ecosystem.

With quality, or should we say customer experience, taking precedence over everything else as far as acquiring a competitive edge in the market is concerned, enterprises are adopting DevOps as a methodology. Here, development and operations are combined in a cultural web where ensuring quality is not a one-off thing but a continuous process to be adhered to. So, when development and operations merge, how does QA fare in the scheme of things? DevOps is all about enhancing the quality of software applications throughout the SDLC and beyond. It incorporates test automation, security, and quality engineering while delivering continuous integration and deployment.

Why DevOps?

Enterprises are adopting this model to create a build ecosystem where quality software is developed quickly – on a weekly, daily, or even hourly basis. Here, the traditional concept of software release gives way to the continuous improvement of products or services. DevOps is the culmination of agile wherein all bottlenecks to delivering a superior quality application are removed. Through DevOps test automation, enterprises can achieve objectives like faster time to market, high-quality applications, instant responsiveness to customer queries or feedback, and preventing the ingress of glitches, among others.

How to incorporate Security into DevOps

As the security of applications becomes a cause of concern due to the rising incidents of cybercrime, customers have become wary of trying out new applications or even using the established ones. Are the concerns of end-customers valid or are they overreacting? The answer to the validity of concerns is a resounding yes. Unfortunately, even when the spectre of cybercrime is on-the-face, many enterprises have not yet woken up to the challenge. There is often a mistaken belief that cybercriminals would only target big and established players, and smaller players can get away without incorporating security into their build pipeline. Since security is such an important part of DevOps, let us understand how to weave awareness about the same in the SDLC.

How to introduce security into DevOps and make it DevSecOps?

The best practices to incorporate security into the DevOps model are as follows:

Create a DevSecOps culture: Every member of an organization should be made aware of the consequences of a security breach, especially on the brand and business. A heightened level of security awareness can help companies in situations where there is pressure to come out with a large number of software applications in lesser time. All-encompassing security culture will prevent developers to take shortcuts and instead insist on making way for DevOps quality assurance. To ensure the incorporation of DevOps QA in the SDLC, the culture for security awareness should be driven from the top. The executives and various stakeholders in the value chain should be made responsible for overseeing the introduction of security into the DevOps model.

Inculcate security awareness: This continues from the above wherein every new hire in the organization should be trained in the basics of security. It could be about writing a secure piece of code or identifying the most common attack vectors. The senior developers and DevOps testing specialists could be tasked with preparing training courses on secure coding protocols or common mistakes. Thus, the senior developers take ownership of these issues, especially when it comes to the daily grind of reviews, builds, and deployments.

Security processes should be compulsory but minimal: People, by and large, dislike lengthy protocols and can be at the end of their tether when the security processes are elaborate. So, it makes sense to lay down short and robust security mechanisms when it comes to dealing with passwords, encryption keys, or ciphers, among others. However, the types of authentication that are required should not be left to guesswork but made mandatory.

Conclusion

With customers taking the lead in determining the success of a software product in the market, enterprises have their task cut out. They can no longer afford to give short shrift to quality while focusing on faster releases alone. In traditional QA, siloed departments often work at cross purposes to each other and render the overall quality of a product less effective. So, to transform the whole QA value chain and deliver outcomes like speeding time to market, increased collaboration, and the delivery of a quality product, DevOps QA takes center-stage. The latter helps to streamline the functioning of silo- driven departments by driving a culture of collaboration.

What is DevOps and what are its benefits?

DevOps combines Development and Operations wherein the thrust is on automating the processes between the two teams. DevOps QA facilitates the development, testing, and release of software, quickly, reliably, and cost effectively. It is underpinned on building a culture of collaboration between the traditionally silo-driven teams. Here, three distinct elements in the whole ecosystem viz., people, processes, and products are integrated to deliver value to the end customers. With DevOps testing services, the entire SDLC is streamlined and accelerated to release applications or services within quick turnarounds.

The various benefits of a DevOps driven build-test-deliver pipeline are as follows:

As enterprises root for digital transformation to stay competitive and deliver the best user experiences, DevOps specialists are looking into the end-to-end product cycle. They do so with the aim of enhancing the quality of software at a lower cost.

Quick fixing of glitches: In the shift-left scheme of development and testing, a code does not move beyond a point until it is tested for various parameters. This results in quick identification of vulnerabilities or glitches and their resolution/mitigation. Thus, the clean code is passed on to the next module or cycle for integration.

Streamlined processes including automation: As DevOps quality assurance goes about breaking silos around teams and streamlines their processes, the quality and speed receive a boost. DevOps test automation stays central to the entire activity as codes are put through automated test scripts for validation. Also, automation can run repetitive processes iteratively leading to the quick identification of glitches.

Better engaged workforce: With DevOps test automation taking up the load of running iterative tests, testers can be deployed elsewhere. The testers can better utilize their skills in activities where there is a scope for innovation. The engaged workforce can ultimately benefit the organization with activities that can keep it competitive.

Collaboration: In traditional QA, teams across the organization generally do not go beyond their remit. This approach often results in ignoring issues, glitches, or vulnerabilities when the product module moves across the pipeline. Since glitches can get into the software at any point in the SDLC, everyone in the organization should be made accountable. There should be a change in culture wherein every member cutting across departments or processes should ensure the product moving through their part of the pipeline is devoid of glitches. Such collaboration can lead to the identification and removal of glitches thereby improving the overall quality of the product.

Continuous integration and delivery: Arguably the ultimate outcome of DevOps where a product can be upgraded based on the feedback from customers or the market. In the real world, customers may come across issues in a product, which did not find traction during development. The operations team must keep their ears to the ground and listen to the feedback. The same should be passed on to the development team for correction. The product pipeline should have a loop of continuous integration and delivery to ensure the quality of the product remains top-notch.

Since the ultimate aim of DevOps is to render the development and delivery of a product glitch-free, QA should be an integral part of the cycle. In other words, DevOps without QA is a recipe for failure. Let us understand this with an example. With faster time to market being one of the objectives of DevOps, enterprises may release a product without proper QA. Since a comprehensive round of QA testing involves checking the usability, functionality, security, and other aspects of a product, the overall quality suffers.

So, even if the customer receives a product quicker than others in the market, its lack of quality can mar the user experience. The quality issues again force the product to be fed into the development pipeline. This entails additional cost, time, and effort on the part of the team. So, on one hand, the product does not receive any goodwill in the market, on the other, it leads to the accrual of additional expenses for the organization. In the competitive world of business, these shortcomings can prove to be the undoing of enterprises.

 QA is everyone’s responsibility

In DevOps software testing, ensuring the quality of software is treated as everyone’s responsibility. This does not, in any way, imply that the QA team becomes redundant. Rather, it underlines that quality has to be ensured at every point of the SDLC and beyond. Every team and individual within the team should take responsibility for the quality and stability of the product. QA should assume a more strategic role of establishing a robust testing architecture or/and offering an oversight of QA.

 Conclusion

The galloping pace of business and technology changes has impacted the manufacturing sector as well. Today, enterprises are aiming to release new products with differentiated features in quick succession rather than the one-time release scenario of the past. To facilitate such frequent releases, enterprises need to streamline their workflows by turning agile. To enable continuous delivery, adopting methodologies like DevOps has become important. DevOps introduces a collaborative approach among the Development, Testing, and Operations teams to achieve rapid and continuous delivery of products and services.

Furthermore, DevOps testing provides the ability to test various aspects of a product feature with the actual users. Thereafter, the feature(s) likened by the actual users is incorporated into the manufacturing process. Thus, the time taken for a feature to be incorporated in the manufacturing execution system - from ideation, design, development, testing, and deployment - gets reduced. This has led to frequent release of products thereby impacting the dynamics of the manufacturing cycle. In the traditional approach of manufacturing, the development and operations teams work in their respective silos leading to delays. The delays mainly resulted from acknowledging, testing, and deploying product(s) in the end-to-end process workflow.

Also, since traditional testing and QA paradigm are not enough to meet the requirements of new age manufacturing, DevOps has come as an enabler in strengthening and streamlining the manufacturing execution system. DevOps testing increases the validity of QA and reduces the risk of implementing changes in the production environment. In the absence of such testing, there is a risk of the production workflow facing service outages. The best part of DevOps QA is in vetting products or their features in an isolated test environment without hampering the actual manufacturing process.

However, there can be issues of the test environment not mimicking the actual production environment. These issues can be the result of the test environment employing different tools, dependencies, firewall rules, or even data. Such differences can bring in risks, for even if the product change passes in the test environment, there is a chance of it failing in the production environment as it was never tested there. However, by employing rigorous software testing for manufacturing in the DevOps structure, the effectiveness of software testing can be increased. This is accomplished by creating test environments that are closer to the real production environment.

Breaking barriers through manufacturing test automation

To ensure the quality and speedy delivery of products, the end-to-end workflow in the production environment should be subjected to a rigorous testing exercise involving DevOps. DevOps testing services break the barriers that exist between development and operations teams by offering a holistic view of processes and issues in their respective workflows. These encompass production line test automation to validate applications or products across environments, platforms, and networks. This leads to a better identification (and fixing) of errors and allows for their quick deployment in succession.

However, to achieve an optimum outcome through manufacturing test automation, the legacy production environment needs to undergo redesigning. This is due to the fact that legacy systems per se are not built to implement test automation. Thus, the redesigning of legacy systems might prove to be a challenge in implementing production line test automation.

Adopting DevOps methodology and CD in a legacy system

The roadmap to implement DevOps in furthering manufacturing production software testing involves three aspects - standardization, automation, and shift-left.

·         Standardization: Over time, small variations in processes might become a part of the legacy systems. However, implementing DevOps with such built-in variations can remain a challenge. So, the standardization process involves identification of such variations and modifying the systems or processes to eliminate them. For example, only a particular test script should be used to validate specific processes or products. The same can be reused for a new process or application by merely modifying the parameters. Also, in many cases, the entire infrastructure behind the running of systems may be standardized.

·         Automation: Post standardization of processes or infrastructure, as the case may be, they ought to be automated. So, any manufacturing test automation process involves the configuration of scripts by using tools. This accelerates testing, makes it repeatable, and eliminates any manual involvement. By making it repeatable, the testing process can be activated on-demand or at periodic intervals. Here, standardization helps in reducing the number of processes to be automated.

·         Shift-Left: This refers to testing an application or process early in the development lifecycle instead of at a later stage. For example, instead of running a regression or performance test post development, the same can be conducted during a system test. This leads to the early identification of integration or performance issues in the lifecycle. Thus, the development team can fix such issues early instead of working under pressure to fix them just before the product release. Additionally, this approach can pre-empt the development team from deferring such problems to the next release. The shift-left approach reduces the cost of eliminating glitches, for it is cost-effective to fix a bug during the development stage rather than in production.

Overall, implementing DevOps testing can lead to the following outcomes:

·         Quick delivery and deployment of products or their features.

·         Creation of a stable production environment.

·         Improved communication and collaboration between teams.

·         Teams get more time to innovate rather than be clogged with fixing and maintenance.

Conclusion

The production environment faces a host of challenges in terms of upholding the quality of products and ensuring their speedy delivery. Since addressing these challenges is the key to stay competitive, DevOps testing services can help businesses to streamline their manufacturing execution system by enforcing better collaboration and communication between the development and operations teams.

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: Automationenhances 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.

To ensure the quality of software across all digital touchpoints, enterprises are embracing DevOps that is underpinned on automation. In fact, automation has become the crux of continuous integration and delivery, the vital Devops testing goals. Without the implementation of automation, DevOps would become a distant dream and businesses would struggle to keep pace with seamless delivery and integration. However, DevOps entails more than the implementation of the latest automation tool and demands a more holistic approach. It does so by bringing together processes, people and technologies under a shared vision. As defined by Microsoft, DevOps is the coalition of products, people and processes to facilitate the seamless delivery of value to the end customers.

DevOps is considered to be the latest advancement of the Agile movement. It includes more number of stakeholders in the process of delivering value by linking the silo based teams. It may not be the best practice but is a discipline of people-centric management. Continuous delivery is the technical foundation of DevOps automation which extends to Agile foundation as well. To put in simply, a close collaboration between the operations and development teams is known as DevOps, which is used to automate the delivery pipeline.

Role of Automation in DevOps to increase productivity

Since digital transformation has taken over the present-day business model, more and more companies are embracing the DevOps practice to drive the automated deployment of software. We are shifting towards an organizational culture where development and testing takes place simultaneously, quickly and more often. This helps to maintain high ratings on the quality of software on a consistent basis with a faster turnaround time. The main agenda of DevOps Testing is to derive quality outcome all along the Software Development Life Cycle and beyond. So, with the help of DevOps culture, a new code of development, testing, and delivery is introduced in the overall SDLC.

The automation in DevOps empowers companies to:

1.      Enhance the reliability, reusability, and quality of all components

2.      Save costs of upgradation and maintenance

3.      Improve the rate of success for standardized processes to ensure rapid delivery of applications

Automate everything! Is it even really possible?

With the help of the DevOps approach, the developers automate and accommodate operational activities - from the source code commit to operational productivities. The primary goal of DevOps automation is to remove bottlenecks in the pipeline by implementing automation in a single level of development. However, DevOps is not a fully automated process as it seems and is definitely not operational without human intervention. It is the DevOps testing specialists who are mainly responsible for the process to run in a flawless manner. Governance at every stage of DevOps Testing is still indispensable in various processes undergoing automation. Importantly, human administration is still crucial in handling exceptions to complete the tasks of automation.

The strategic role of humans in DevOps to ensure a continuous pipeline

1) To remove the boundaries of roles

The primary feature of DevOps automation culture is about an enhanced collaboration between the operations and development teams. It has led to a cultural transformation at the organization’s level and inside the teams as well to encourage continuous delivery. Since shared collaboration is an important aspect of the DevOps culture, it strengthens the collaboration within teams. Prior to the DevOps approach, the perceived lack of interest of the development team in the maintenance and operations used to affect DevOps Testing and business goals. This happened as the development team used to hand over the software to the operations teams. However, this scenario has since changed due to an organizational shift towards automation and DevOps Testing.

The gap between the silos of operations and development has been removed with the arrival of DevOps. It has removed the boundaries of several organizational roles. Teams require to focus on the shared goals of DevOps to enhance the end user experience. So, the team members need to rethink every investment and decision around this shared goal, which obviously requires human intervention. Automation cannot substitute the decision-making process presided by humans, for the latter has become vital across the organizational ecosystem as and when needed.

2) To omit one size fits all approach in DevOps Testing

Automation cannot be viewed as the eliminator of roles. The organization still requires the expert knowledge and skillset inside your team. The focus should be on developing agile and cross-functional teams that are recognized for removing long-established stumbling blocks between the operations and development teams and for facilitating collaboration. Developing efficient and functional teams would make sure the delivery of superior quality products.

3) Continuous Monitoring, testing, and improvement

One of the key agenda of DevOps Testing is to carry out a deeper level of monitoring. Since, rigorous monitoring is needed at every layer of the testing process, from integration to infrastructure and transactions to components, it has become a crucial part of the road map of the DevOps approach. In this digitally connected world, monitoring and testing are no longer distinguishable. Continuous monitoring by testers offers a positive response to the user experience while eradicating pre and post-production obstacles.

Conclusion

With the impetus in the growth of DevOps and Agile practices in the past few years, testing has taken a new structure and form. It has evolved into a crucial discipline and is not restricted to a phase of the development cycle anymore. It has become an essential part of the operational activities of production. So, is the role of a tester transformed radically from only a checkpoint to a crucial active participant in the DevOps Testing? Teams need to cooperate among themselves based on the shared vision of enhancing augmented user experience. We need to understand the fact that automation is not an elixir to deliver on DevOps goals but merely a part of the DevOps strategy.

This article is originally published at devops.com, The Human Value in Automation-Driven DevOps Testing.

Summary: DevOps is an agile methodology that allows developers, testers and operations teams to work together and break the silos. But, maintaining a real time environment for DevOps has many constraints involved and leveraging service virtualization proves to be cost effective for DevOps.

Body:

DevOps has been attracting enterprises for quite some time now as the unique integration of development and operations continues to gain traction to ensure the development of quality software products with shorter releases. Moreover, DevOps implementations also promise faster delivery schedules due to continuous integration and continuous delivery. Specifically DevOps QA, developers and testers use agile and lean methodologies to test software during various stages of the software development lifecycle. As DevOps employs Agile methodologies that helps to break silos, a real time environment is the key where different components of the software can be tested that assumes a important significance.

But, in order to create a real test environment, there are a number of dependencies which have been listed below:

·       Various teams such as developers, testers, operation teams might have certain internal dependencies

·       Dependencies might arise due to distance, language, time zones, which cannot be included easily under a real time test environment

·       Costs might also be an important factor hindering the DevOps effectiveness

·       Software architecture components might be recently developed or might not have been properly tested

·       Heterogeneous enterprise IT architectures and lack of proper collaboration also act as hindrances

·       Lack of proper visibility into what happens in the production environment

There are also certain other factors that cause hindrance for DevOps operations and for continuous testing. But, the above mentioned challenges can be successfully overcome through a Service Virtualization technique. If this technique is employed, it allows and helps in the proper integration of various disciplines of DevOps testing to be done on par and helps to save time and cost and also ensures enhancement of an organizations brand value. This is an environment that takes advantage of the below points:

·       It helps create a functional test environment that facilitates no real dependencies on datasets

·       Errors, bugs and glitches if any can be easily addressed more promptly and delivers better quality software

·       Different types of data sets can be used to check the behavior of various dependencies

·       Integration of various disciplines becomes easy

·       It successfully leads to cost savings and time savings

What is DevOptimize and how does it help to achieve Ease of DevOps Implementations?

DevOptimize enables rapid delivery of capabilities to the end consumers by breaking the silos between product owners, architects, developers, testers, release managers, and system operators and thus stimulating collaboration and innovation between development and operations teams. It also offers iterative development process and encompasses all aspects of DevOps lifecycle to achieve maximum effect and efficiency paving way for more agile deployments.

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