#devops quality assurance

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

In a world driven by technology, quality has become paramount. This is because glitch-prone software can render the performance of systems ineffective causing adverse consequences - both for the users and enterprises. To mitigate glitches, enhance user experiences, and bring about a holistic improvement in processes, DevOps methodology needs to become mainstream. It can address issues such as missed release deadlines, risky releases, and long release cycles. As a third-generation development methodology, DevOps is an extension of Agile and aims at overcoming challenges of culture, collaboration, and automation. Further, if you seek to deliver applications continuously, reduce waste, and establish a quick feedback mechanism, then DevOps is the way to follow.

In DevOps testing, the collaboration between development and operations teams is aimed at achieving an integrated build environment with quality at the core. DevOps quality assurance helps to reduce the release cycle time, the number of defects during the build, delivery, and maintenance phases, cost of ownership and operations, and accelerate the time to market.

 What is DevOps?

This methodology is designed to improve collaboration between the development and operations teams through the automation of processes. The outcomes aimed at are build, test, and deliver software quickly and consistently. In DevOps transformation, a large project is broken into smaller independent building blocks. This means if any glitches are found they can be remedied locally without impacting the entire value chain.

DevOps transformation is about extending Agile in the build cycle to achieve continuous delivery at minimal risk. However, achieving transformation would depend on a host of factors. These include business and IT requirements, type of technology used, work culture, and the structure and processes of the organization.

 Benefits DevOps testing services can accrue for enterprises

In a technology-driven IT landscape where user experiences shape the growth trajectory of enterprises, DevOps testing can act as an insurance of sorts. The insurance can be against releasing glitch-prone software, causing software breaches and bad user experiences, or loss in brand value. Also, in the IoT-driven digital environment consisting of a host of embedded software, glitches can play havoc with the lives of people and organizations. For example, if the navigation software in an aircraft contains a glitch, the pilots can misread the instructions causing the aircraft to crash. Again, if the software within a diagnostic tool has some erroneous codes, the readings can lead to wrong diagnosis and treatment.

·   Faster time-to-market: DevOps test automation takes forward the application of Agile principles leading to faster development and frequent delivery of software. In this decade where customers would be spoilt for choices and new technologies making inroads into the applications, DevOps can deliver greater user experiences.

·   Better collaboration: In a growing competitive environment, teams operating in silos are a misfit. DevOps implementation would entail the breaking down of such silos and improving transparency. There should be more focus on collaboration, communication, and integration of teams whether operating locally or globally. This can lead to better agility and an environment where everyone in the SDLC would be responsible to meet the quality and delivery timelines.

·   Early detection and correction of glitches: Since DevOps testing is an extension of Agile, it involves automation-driven shift-left testing. Since every code is tested during the build stage itself, glitches, if any, are identified quickly and corrected. This is in sharp contrast to the waterfall method where glitches are identified later in the process. And they entail a lot of effort, time, and cost for correction.

·   Security: Arguably the most important element in software development, testing, and delivery pipeline as it carries serious implications. With cybersecurity scare on the rise and hackers seemingly pitting themselves one step ahead, security has become everyone’s business. So, be it logging into the systems or ensuring proper user authentication, established security protocols should be followed by everyone in the development and delivery pipeline. This is where DevSecOps methodology can mandate the use of security testing in every stage of the SDLC. This is of prime importance as any lingering vulnerability in the build can be exploited by cybercriminals at any phase of the project.

 Conclusion

With quality-driven customer satisfaction becoming the key differentiator for businesses, the role of QA has undergone a transformation. If earlier, software testing was an adjunct to the development process, it has become a shared responsibility involving every department and process within an organization today. The QA process has transitioned from being an afterthought in traditional waterfall to being mandatory with Agile and DevOps testing. This has come about in response to the compatibility challenges software applications face when accessed through various devices, platforms, and operating environments.

Furthermore, with growing security implications for applications while they are being increasingly embraced by users, quality testing is no longer a one-time activity but a continuous process. This is where DevOps has emerged as the go-to methodology for businesses to deliver quality products and services swiftly and continually. DevOps, with its four pillars of culture, collaboration, tools, and practices, enables businesses to deliver outcomes such as better-quality products, faster software releases, quick response to feedback, improved productivity, cost savings, and increased ROI.  

Even though most businesses understand the utility of implementing DevOps, the challenges come in its implementation. The challenges relate to tackling issues that seem to differ from one domain/department/process/tool to another across organizations. Let us delve into the challenges that DevOps implementation entails.

Challenges in implementing DevOps

DevOps has the potential to garner positive outcomes for businesses, but the many challenges associated with its implementation can often play spoilsport. The following challenges cannot be glossed over.

Legacy systems and applications: While businesses focus on developing new systems with DevOps, they should also work towards transitioning the legacy systems to the new DevOps led regime. The transition of legacy apps or systems to a DevOps ecosystem one can be done by creating a new system that not only maintains the legacy apps but ensures noninterference with the transition. Post-implementation of DevOps, the legacy applications should be phased out gradually.

Integration of tools across domains: DevOps testing services require integration of various tools across departments and processes to ensure they work in tandem. This is necessary to make the process of development, testing, and deployment seamless and capable of delivering customer satisfaction. Moreover, since the development and operations teams work on separate metrics and toolkits, harmonizing them can be a challenge.

Culture: Since the development, testing, and operations teams follow different work cultures, bridging them and bringing them on a level playing field can be challenging. To address the situation, DevOps specialists should be created across departments and processes who can build a collaborative environment. The focus should shift from individual, silo-based teams to inter-departmental coordination.

Choosing the right projects: The DevOps specialists should not look to apply DevOps to every project. This is due to the fact that DevOps happens to be an operational strategy that does not necessarily be a perfect fit everywhere. However, should you want to scale your software application to garner deliverables, then DevOps can be adopted as a suitable model.

The above-mentioned challenges pertaining to the implementation of DevOps (and allied models like DevOps test automation, DevOps software testing, and others) can be addressed by following the best practices.

Best practices in implementing DevOps quality assurance

To ensure the success of DevOps and allied services, businesses should incorporate the best practices listed below.

Learn about your business needs: Ensure that DevOps implementation is aligned to your business goals. Prior to creating the IT infrastructure, understand the application and design the infrastructure in accordance with your goals.

Ensure continuous integration and deployment: Implementing DevOps testing can only make sense if your organization is able to deliver software frequently without any issues. This requires the incorporation of DevOps test automation throughout the build, testing, and deployment stages.

Implement test automation and data provisioning: Since DevOps is about building, testing, and delivering quality software quickly and continuously, implementing test automation becomes the key. The process of DevOps software testing would entail placing the code in a sandbox and running thousands of tests by assigning relevant test data.

 Conclusion

In a fast-moving, dynamically-changing business landscape, enterprises should be prepared to stay ahead of the competition curve. To achieve the objective, they must embrace DevOps by exploring the benefits of different tools, monitoring the performance of legacy and DevOps systems, among others.

 Author Bio

Oliver has been associated with Cigniti Technologies Ltd as an Associate Manager - Content Marketing, with over 10 years of industry experience as a Content Writer in Software Testing & Quality Assurance industry. Cigniti is a Global Leader in Independent Quality Engineering & Software Testing Services with CMMI-SVC v1.3, Maturity Level 5

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.