#devops software testing

Covid-19 has hit the global economy very hard. With people being forced to quarantine themselves and maintain social distancing, the new normal of working remotely has taken center stage. However, digital companies have quickly adapted to the new development or mode of working and shown the world how things can be kept operational even when everything is closed. In fact, digital technologies have become the enabler in allowing people to work remotely even during such disruptions. Amid calls for maintaining social distancing and following a ‘work from home’ model, enterprises can keep the SDLC up and running. To do so, they may adopt DevOps software testing and focus on embracing a culture of collaboration and learning.

The best part is that DevOps specialists can work remotely by accessing tools from the cloud. They can ensure any Business Continuity Plan to run unhindered. The Covid-19 is unprecedented in the sense that in earlier times, disaster management was about fixing a site or two that had gone down. But now, the situation demanded the entire IT architecture to be shifted to the cloud and every employee to work remotely. The concept of DevOps, an enhanced model of Agile, is underpinned on conducting daily team meetings and collaboration. In such meetings, plans are made, reviews of last work are taken, and any new challenge is acknowledged. The entire meeting is conducted among co-located employees using tools like whiteboards. However, with Covid-19 led social distancing norms being the order of the day, teams offering DevOps testing services are falling back on cloud-based IT automation tools. Before discussing how DevOps can help enterprises in dealing with the crisis borne out of a socially-distanced world, let us know what it is all about.

What is DevOps?

An acronym for Development and Operations, the methodology is an enhancement of the Agile model of software development. It aims at improving communication and collaboration between the two business units by streamlining and automating the SDLC. DevOps combines practices, cultures, tools, and processes to scale the enterprise’s capability to deliver products or services at quick speeds. Here the thrust is on continuous development, testing, integration, and delivery of products after taking feedback from the end-customers. DevOps is all about refining a software product continuously to ensure it remains trendy and addresses the needs of the customers. Also, with security playing a key role in any software product, every process, team, or department within an organization should be accountable in implementing the same by following DevSecOps.

What is DevOps software testing?

It follows the Agile way of software testing where QA works alongside development in pre-arranged sprints. Here, a code is tested and integrated to another module in the development phase itself by using automation. To redefine DevOps quality assurance in a socially-distanced world, there should be a change in approach, especially from the DevOps testing specialists. There are as follows -

# Teamwork: In such times when you are on your own (literally) and do not have the neighbour’s desk to ‘consult,’ you should focus more on documentation. Before going about any job, be clear about the requirement(s) and write clear messages for your peers and superiors to understand. If earlier, little transgressions were overlooked due to quick and better monitoring, now the same can lead to a logjam.

# Continuous Integration: DevOps is all about automating the testing process for obtaining optimum results. While working remotely, a CI pipeline should be in place developed by DevOps engineers, DevOps specialists, or anyone with the knowledge and experience in enabling DevOps test automation. The tester should feed the code in the CI pipeline to run the required tests. The test automation software within the CI pipeline should test if the code conforms to the established protocol. Such a pipeline would give results in quick time, be the code written by you or someone else.

# Continuous Deployment: After the code transitions through the CI pipeline, it is time to merge your code. So, your job seems to be done and deployment remains the job of the Ops team. The latter needs to get the same back into production. So, instead of relegating the job to the Ops team, why not make a seamless process wherein both Development and Operations work in synchrony? So, in addition to building a CI pipeline, one must create a CD pipeline as well. The pipeline will ensure the code fed into the CI pipeline enters production. In doing so, you can automate the process by setting up metrics and take care of bugfixes, future feature development, and more automation, among others.

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

The realization that adherence to quality is not a one off affair but the essential requisite for businesses to earn customers trust is driving companies to adopt the DevOps approach. It is a move over Agile and includes elements like Continuous Integration/Delivery. DevOps QA requires the Development, Testing, and Operations teams to collaborate seamlessly to offer quality products and services to the end customer. It is no longer confined to the SDLC phase alone but goes beyond by creating a total quality culture. It is the culture that ensures the quality of products or services to be upheld during the entire product lifecycle.

The DevOps testing strategy helps in better and quicker identification of glitches and improves the rate of deployment. It entails the simplification of process workflows in departments, improving intra department/process communication, and creating a common objective. However, for DevOps to work to its full potential, it should be enabled by the use of tools. The tools are not ‘one size fits all’ type and help in achieving Continuous Integration/Delivery, information sharing, process automation, and a shorter process cycle.

Since these tools come with a robust reporting mechanism, they help in generating quality feedback for every stakeholder to understand and follow. Besides achieving the DevOps objectives, the tools are categorized into groups based on their functionality. These are Continuous Integration, Configuration Management, Continuous Inspection, Containerization, and Virtualization. The DevOps team should ensure the following before embarking on DevOps testing:

All stakeholders should be on the same page during transformation to the DevOps model

Take one department or process at a time and thereafter include others incrementally

Measure the output of your department/process before and after DevOps adoption on the basis of well-defined metrics

Automate processes that are needed instead of forcing all into DevOps test automation

5 tools to enable the adoption of DevOps

#1 Nagios & Icinga: Among the many open source tools, Nagios or Nagios Core is a highly effective infrastructure monitoring tool thanks to the presence of a dedicated community of developers who create plugins. Nagios comes in three variants viz., XI, Log Server, and Fusion. While XI monitors all mission critical infrastructure components of an OS, the Log Server audits your system and identifies the security threats and trends among others. Fusion, on the other hand, provides a centralized network view. Overall, the tool written in C language monitors as well as alerts users about malfunctioning servers, switches, applications, and services.

Similar to Nagios is Icinga. Its scalable fork with high level features provide a great user experience. It monitors the software infrastructure with an SSL protected cluster system.

#2 Jenkins: This Java-based open source tool helps in DevOps testing by building, testing, and integrating software continuously besides monitoring some of the externally run jobs. Its popularity among the DevOps testing specialists is due to its GUI-based scalability and customization features. The fact that it requires little maintenance and has a repository of over 400 plugins makes it easier to build and execute any type of test cases.

#3 Docker: This open source containerization platform helps developers and admins to send a product or service for delivery without the intervening cross functional environments. Through its containerization technology, Docker lends portability to applications by moving them across platforms in self-contained units. Its standardized format and the ease of writing test cases in virtually any language make it easier for both the development and operations teams to use it. The tools help in configuration management, scaling, and controlling glitches.

#4 Git or GitHub: This open source tool came about as a response to Linux community’s need for a Source Control Management (SCM) software. It helps in control management and lends support to distributed systems. Its features such as enabling repos, local branching, convenient staging, multiple workflows, and pull requests among others make integration and deployment easy.

#5 AWS: The Amazon Web Services provide flexible services for developers to deliver quick products or services through its robust cloud computing features. The many features include networking, database, analytics, storage, computation, deployment, management, mobility, and application services.

Conclusion

The aforementioned DevOps tools help in automating test cases and provide the right CI and CD environment to deploy products and services smoothly.

The growing threats to cybersecurity from hackers and cyber criminals have made companies to sit up and take notice. It is no longer about thinking or assuming, ‘I am not at risk and so, I need not worry’ as trojans, viruses, bots, and malware are swirling around on the internet. With digital transformation striking deep roots across the spectrum, individuals, businesses, industries and organizations have invested in building IT infrastructure with a vengeance. This is due to the fact that no one wants to lose out on a large slice of customers on the go, besides, of course, leveraging the other spinoffs.

These include developing and delivering quality products, establishing a seamless communication, and achieving greater efficiency and ROI. The dependence of entities and customers worldwide on the internet has lured cyber criminals to steal data and information for making a quick buck. Moreover, given the reach of these fraudsters and the fact that the law enforcement agencies find it difficult to catch up with them, these more or less seem to operate with impunity.

Here, small businesses are more at risk, as their digital infrastructure often lacks the requisite cybersecurity measures. This is not to state that bigger organizations with a better security paraphernalia do not fall foul of such activities but the odds are certainly stacked high against smaller businesses.

As cyber criminals are getting smarter by the day and finding out new ways to exploit the vulnerabilities and breach the security of a system, the task is cut out for companies to secure their systems and networks. This calls for implementing new methodologies, models and protocols such as DevOps or DevSecOps. The imperative for adopting this approach has become pronounced due to the interface online systems share with the cloud, mobility, social media, and big data.

Why DevSecOps?

Since strengthening cybersecurity is about plugging the vulnerabilities and developing robust applications, it needs a concerted effort from all quarters. This is where DevOps (Development and Operations) comes with its emphasis on Continuous Improvement and Delivery across the SDLC. The cybersecurity strategy should have involvement from both the technical and business sides.

Remember! The DevOps approach is not only about enabling business agility through accelerated development, testing and deployment, but involves creating a collaborative quality culture across the organization as well.

It is this culture or ecosystem that acts as a bulwark against cybersecurity threats, for everyone in the organization will be responsible to enforce security measures. These include steps such as not sharing passwords or accessing emails from suspected sources, logging out after every session, etc. The focus should be to align data security goals with business objectives early on in the development of an application. Since DevSecOps solutions are hinged on running test automation, validating applications in terms of security (and others) becomes easy and comprehensive.

Mitigation of cybersecurity threats courtesy DevOps security testing

Security audit: If a business does not employ DevSecOps solutions as a part of its development strategy, it is high time to implement the same. During implementation, DevOps specialists should audit the devices that are connected to the central information network. These can range from the remotely connected devices like WiFi routers, mobiles, and tablets to laptops or dumb terminals that are part of the intranet. The audit identifies the resident vulnerabilities in the entire system network and provides for an extra layer of security.

Security integration: Security should ideally be built into the development process and not as an afterthought for the quality assurance team to deal with. The CI/CD approach of DevOps software testing should integrate security into the whole matrix, thus strengthening cybersecurity.

Automation: The process of conducting a security audit for the entire IT network of a business should incorporate test automation. This has been necessitated due to the release or update of more number of software, which makes it virtually impossible to identify and plug the security vulnerabilities. Remember, Continuous Improvement and Delivery must feature Continuous Security Controls as well.

Conclusion

The strengthening of cybersecurity measures in the development cum testing sprint should be proactive, which even saves time and money by a large measure. The collaborative approach of DevSecOps software testing is best suited to identify and plug security related vulnerabilities, leading to securing businesses and customers from the growing threats of cyber criminals.

Digital transformation has led to increased connectivity and development of innovative software products. It has added value to businesses and has impacted the lives of customers in a big way. Thanks to its impact, tasks that were in the realm of science fiction in a not so distant past have become a reality. Furthermore, the penetration of mobility solutions has brought the fruits of digital technology to the people at large. For example, mobile apps are being used to pay for utility services, get health and news bulletins, buy groceries and tickets among other things.

Even as digital transformation (on account of IT-enabled products and services) has helped to enhance the quality of our lives, it has increased the risk of product failures as well. With the functioning of entities and individuals increasingly underpinned by digitization, any failure of a product or service can bring everything to a standstill. Imagine a scenario where a snag in the banking or reservation software can leave thousands of customers high and dry.

The need for continuous testing of products has evolved to validate the latter’s quality and prevent situations as described above. Moreover, enterprises aim at accelerating the release of software in the market to pre-empt competitors and to garner a better market presence. This is where the traditional testing approaches have been found to be wanting. Hence, a concerted drive by enterprises to move towards DevOps testing.

What is DevOps?

The need to develop quality products at a faster rate that meet the criteria of performance, functionality, usability and security among others has brought in the concept of Agile testing. In other words, the testing of a product is to be executed at the development stage itself rather than in later stages of the SDLC. To implement Agile or shift-left testing and prepare the product for future rollouts, DevOps has been thought of as a QA culture. 

It is a culture that combines two important departments of an enterprise namely, Development and Operations. DevOps calls for an increased collaboration between the two departments by breaking silos and reconciling conflicting priorities. DevOps testing enjoins upon the two departments to deliver quality products in a reliable, safe and rapid manner. Moreover, to ensure a product works to its potential and provides an optimum user experience, the two departments need to support each other. DevOps software testing aims at providing value to the business through Continuous Delivery. It combines the twin concepts of Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment.

Why should DevOps become the preferred software testing strategy?

Digital transformation requires the development, testing and delivery of quality products at a faster pace to offer a seamless user experience and achieve ROI. DevOps software testing precisely does that by facilitating continuous development, testing and integration in the SDLC.

#1 Quicker innovation and roll out of products: When the development and operations teams work in harmony there is a quicker identification of glitches and delivery of products. Hence, should the development (and testing) team builds quality products quickly, the operations team ensures the same is delivered with reduced lead times. Moreover, customer feedback is rightly taken into consideration by the operations team to improve the product even further (if needed).

#2 Reduces the risk of failed products: Continuous testing as a part of DevOps quality assurance ensures that glitches are identified early on in the development process. It helps as any code change during the development process can increase the scope for errors. If left unchecked or checked in the later phases of the SDLC, the cost of rectification increases not to speak of impacting the turnaround time negatively.

#3 Better test consistency: DevOps specialists use test automation to carry out various functional and non-functional tests. The process builds a consistent and robust test environment that ensures a coordinated functioning of various systems and sub-systems. The robust test automation environment can later be reused for similar types of testing thus saving costs.

#4 Improves test coverage: Continuous testing by the DevOps testing specialists invariably makes use of test automation. This approach provides a better feedback mechanism, transparency and achieves a more test coverage area. It helps to identify and eliminate the glitches better leading to the deployment of a better quality software.

Conclusion

Continuous testing and integration, which form part of the DevOps testing strategy help in better identification of bugs leading to savings on the cost of rework. This helps in better integration of the product and increases its overall lifespan. When quality products reach the market faster they effectively meet the user expectations and help achieve ROI.

Enterprises have taken to digital transformation in a big way in order to meet the rising customer demand for better products and services. The need of the hour for them is to remain competitive by reaching the market faster with quality products. In fact, pursuing the latter objective holds much more significance in meeting customer expectations. Given the plethora of choices customers have they may like to expand the product range and try out new offerings.

However, the products they are likely to stick with will be the ones that are well tested and quality assured. The advent of DevOps has been to address the twin supposedly opposite objectives of ensuring faster product cycles and quality. The thought process behind DevOps is to include all the stakeholders in an enterprise, namely Development and Operations to include ‘quality’ into their rigmarole. As a successor to Agile, DevOps goes a step further in following testing as a part of the development sprint.

DevOps talks about continuous integration and delivery of products through continuous testing. According to this approach, a product needs to be evaluated on the yardstick of quality throughout its usage cycle. Thus, not only a product should go through rigorous quality testing during its development phase but even when it is being used by the customers. As applications become more complex they are needed to be updated from time to time. And carrying out such upgrades in real time is one of the crucial features of continuous testing a la DevOps.

The demands of faster release cycles and continuous testing have necessitated the use of DevOps test automation.

However, DevOps test automation can go wrong as well if not followed through by using the right automation strategy. Besides, the initial costs of automated DevOps testing can be intimidating for enterprises. Many organizations end up spending a considerable amount of time, money and effort in implementing the automation of DevOps quality assurance. However, when it comes to realizing the fruits of DevOps they often end up getting scalded. The objective should be to build a strong automation strategy to address the need for continuous integration and delivery.

Why is a strong automated DevOps quality assurance strategy needed?

Realize CI/CT goals: To achieve a faster product development cycle, the code must be tested throughout the SDLC phase and beyond. Only test automation can achieve repetitive testing of variables across systems, platforms, frameworks, browsers, geographies and networks.

Reduces QA costs: Notwithstanding the high initial cost of deploying a suite of test automation software, it can have myriad advantages. These range from the reuse of scripts and the requirement of fewer testers to a better identification and elimination of glitches, and increasing the throughput.  

To set the right test cases: It is not possible to automate every single process. The key is to identify the areas and processes where the automation of DevOps software testing can bring viable results. Moreover, keyword based tests can work better and faster as opposed to a complex script based test automation software. The areas that are needed to be chosen as test cases can cover repetitive tests, high risk, large data sets, and testing across browsers, platforms, and environments.

Early testing: DevOps testing specialists can write test scripts alongside developers. This results in an early detection of bugs and subsequent cost savings due to the absence of any rework. On the other hand, the late detection of bugs can result in significant cost escalation in altering the code from scratch.

Future proofing: Many times, DevOps testing specialists change the testing architecture or the tool to meet the testing requirements of the day. This can have an impact on the costs. The test automation process should choose a tool that is platform agnostic.  

Transparency: Test automation includes the use of a better reporting mechanism. The scripts, variables, objectives and outcomes are shared across the dashboard leading to transparency. The test results, be it in the form of a success or failure, are available for viewing by each and every stakeholder.

Conclusion

By adopting the right automated DevOps testing strategy, quicker product development and deployment cycles can be achieved at cost effective rates. The challenge is to write automated test scripts that stay relevant over a period of time.