#devops testing services

DevOps is tied in with smoothing out and automating your whole programming conveyance lifecycle. For most Software Testing companies, a fruitful DevOps testing procedure begins with taking on the best act of Continuous Integration (CI), where engineers register code with a common vault a few times each day. Each registration is then confirmed by an automated system, permitting engineers to distinguish mistakes and issues straightaway. Automation Testing structures and CI instruments, for example, Jenkins and Bamboo are additionally used to construct, test, and deliver applications naturally when necessities change to accelerate the delivery cycle.

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 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.

The consumers of today are a smarter lot who want the best quality software with cutting-edge features and functionalities. This changing dynamics of demand and preferences for quality products or services has led to a churning of sorts where staying competitive is hinged on ensuring quick market reach and superior quality of software products. The churning has led to the advent of DevOps process of developing software applications. DevOps is an enhancement of the Agile model of software development where development and testing take place simultaneously with the active involvement of other departments, especially operations. Enterprises, in order to address the rapidly changing customer preferences and level of competition, are adopting the DevOps model. By doing so, they are better responding to the market need for delivering quality products at a quicker pace.

DevOps is also about detecting and preventing glitches in any software application and ensuring all future releases of the application remain glitch-free as well. In other words, DevOps leads to the delivery of better-quality software (and all future releases) in the quickest possible time. DevOps QA does not stop at merely delivering the software application to the customer but ensuring the same continues to work to its optimum level as well. In a competitive business landscape, when customers have plenty of options to choose from, glitch-free software applications can help enterprises to uphold their brand equity and stay competitive.

DevOps and its outcomes

An extension of Agile, DevOps ensures continuous delivery and improvement of software applications in the SDLC. It leads to the below mentioned outcomes

·         Seamless and transparent collaboration between departments, especially Development and Operations (the acronym for DevOps).

·         Reduces transaction cost by streamlining the software development and delivery pipeline.

·         Quick release of quality software application and maintain consistency in delivering periodic upgrades to meet the market demand.

·         Create a stable operating environment.

·         Early detection (and prevention) of glitches with DevOps test automation.

Is DevOps queering the pitch for QA professionals?

The DevOps outcomes of continuous improvement and delivery have necessitated creating an automated pipeline where the existence of separate QA departments is called into question. However, this is far from true, for DevOps testing services have become even more important albeit operating with different mindset and objectives. The need to establish a test-driven development environment with continuous testing at its core has rendered DevOps specialists irreplaceable in the scheme of things.

Traditionally, development, QA, and operations worked in their respective silos with different deliverables and objectives. For example, the development team is all about building new software, adding new features, and providing periodic upgrades based on market demand or customer preferences. Similarly, the operations team is about delivering stability and responsiveness to customer services. However, the key department that joins the above two teams is that of Quality Assurance and Testing. It ensures that software application to be delivered to the end customer should not contain any glitch or bug, and all the features run seamlessly. However, DevOps entails integrating all the above teams or departments into one entity and calls for a common DevOps QA procedure in the SDLC. Thus, in the DevOps-led software development pipeline, the role of quality assurance did not reduce but rather became prominent.

Why QA and DevOps are bound together?

Since DevOps is all about achieving continuous improvement and delivery, DevOps software testing becomes an integral component of the whole approach. Therefore, once a software code is written in a sprint, it is simultaneously tested for glitches based on a number of parameters. The DevOps specialists incorporate QA in the sprint and make everyone responsible to achieve a single goal of delivering products or services that offer the best user experience. The notion that in a DevOps setup QA may take a backseat is wholly misplaced. On the contrary, DevOps QA moves into a more strategic space of creating a robust test infrastructure.

The success of DevOps in collaboration with QA will depend on the following factors -

·         Executing DevOps test automation in the entire SDLC

·         Executing continuous testing

·         Adoption of Lean and Agile processes

·         Adoption of test virtualization, optimization, and standardization

·         Incorporating quality engineering

Contrary to the traditional approach where QA comes toward the end of a delivery cycle, QA comes at every level in DevOps. In the development sprint, the QA team receives the code, tests it, and passes it on to the production pipeline (provided there are no glitches). The DevOps model ensures the incorporation of QA tools and infrastructure to help release the software application with consistent quality.

Moreover, in the present competitive environment where there is a need to release (and update) web or mobile applications quickly, DevOps quality assurance plays a significant role. In the DevOps approach, quality testing is done in real-time instead of testing the code offline. With quality engineering stepping into the whole process, the test infrastructure checks for the performance of every component of an application before its eventual release. 

Another dimension of executing QA in today’s software development lifecycle is ensuring security. With threats emanating from malware, trojans, and viruses becoming more pronounced and cybercrime a distinct reality, any software application worth its salt should undergo security testing. Since an application can remain vulnerable to security threats, it becomes everyone’s responsibility to ensure proper safeguards are maintained. For example, if the development and QA team ensures vulnerabilities are done away with, the operations team should ensure incidents like unauthorized log-ins and password sharing should be nipped in the bud. Thus, the SDLC should incorporate DevSecOps where security becomes a collaborative approach.

Conclusion

DevOps without QA will be an unmitigated disaster as the whole approach of delivering quality software application in the quickest possible time will stand defeated. The QA specialists should use appropriate tools to ensure the released application is shorn of glitches and delivers a great user experience.