#devops testing strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Expedite application delivery through agile: DevOps offers rigorous development, testing, and delivery of software. According to the traditional procedure of software release, the development teams first create the code and then tests it in an entirely isolated environment, wherein the operations team takes charge for production. Thus, the lack of synchronization between the two teams creates multiple complexities as they do not follow the same configuration, infrastructure,deployment, performance monitoring, and log management, which eventually slows down the production process.

However, with the help of DevOps test automation, organizations can expedite delivery and minimize the release time. It helps enterprises to go to the market faster and stay ahead of the competition. DevOps with agile testing strategy also helps in the early detection of errors and offers quick fixes. Overall, DevOps, with the help of automation, assists organizations to concentrate more on innovation with more stable operating environments.

  Enhanced application reliability: 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.

The Application Programming Interface or API is an important set of tools, protocols or programs that connects applications and servers and helps them communicate with each other without any human intervention. It enables the internet to remain a vast reservoir of interconnected applications that provides various types of services to the users. For example, if one is able to log into popular sites like Quora by using Facebook or Google, then it is validated by APIs that work behind the scenes. Another example is the rating of websites (policy bazaar.com etc) that garner information from relevant websites and provide them on a single platform. Similarly, APIs help mobile applications to interact with multiple elements and environments such as devices, operating systems, memory, processors, and networks. In the absence of APIs, the application running on your mobile will come to nought. 

Since APIs play such a crucial role in the functioning of an application, they need to be tested a la API testing to identify the hidden glitches that can render an application dysfunctional or face latency. In both cases, the application will not offer the desired result and lead to customer dissatisfaction. And if not dealt with appropriately, the dissatisfaction, in due course, shall get reflected in the balance sheet of the organization. Since glitches in the APIs can impact the customer experience, API testing should involve the checking of endpoints by following DevOps methodology. The methodology includes Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Testing (CT), and Continuous Delivery (CD).

Factors fuelling API test automation

Internet of Things (IoT): IoT involves increased and glitch free communication between devices such as sensors, actuators etc. In practice, this entails a robust communication between applications that are embedded within such devices.

Cloud computing: Devices connected to cloud based servers need to communicate by using APIs. Thus, if the APIs are not tested for their functionality, load carrying capacity, integration, reliability, security and usability among others, the devices would not meet the desired outcomes.

Continuous integration as in DevOps  quality assurance

To test each and every feature of an application, the DevOps team should run builds to identify glitches early in the development process. This helps the team to gain a greater insight into the APIs and identify the areas to conduct regression testing. In the ultimate analysis, while developing an application, the DevOps QA team should focus on testing the APIs so that each feature of the application is able to communicate seamlessly with other applications or systems.

As API test automation fits well into the continuous testing rigmarole of DevOps testing, it is better placed than GUI testing. Following are the reasons why testing the APIs is convenient in the DevOps model compared to GUI testing.

When it comes to multiple architectures, GUI tests often fall short in testing the functional paths or APIs. However, testing APIs is much more stable.

In the quick test sprints of DevOps testing involving faster feedbacks, the GUI based tests are time consuming and need a considerable rework. However, testing APIs is easier, quicker, and more stable.

Strategy to test APIs in a DevOps model

Initial setup: The testing setup should begin in the design phase of an application and should involve test automation to gauge how the APIs perform under stress conditions.

Schema updation: The best way to avoid API changes and the resultant downtime is by testing them in beta and alpha driven environment. This way, the number of glitches shall reduce substantially when tested in accordance with the schema.

Parameter combination: APIs carry out communication between applications or systems through data requests wherein parameters are assigned specific data values. To pre-empt the presence of glitches in specific configurations, a comprehensive testing of all parameter combinations should be conducted. The types of glitches in such testing can include assigning two data values to a single parameter or text values appearing in place of numerical values.

API call sequencing: The testing team can face sequencing issues when API calls need to appear in a certain order. To get over this scenario, the testing team should visualize the API calls by making a flowchart. By doing this, the developer team can quickly build and integrate the API calls without creating glitches.

Conclusion

The process of digital transformation can come unstuck if proper testing of the APIs is not conducted. It is needed to identify and eliminate glitches that may hinder any communication between applications and systems.

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.