#devopscontinuoustesting

The need to deliver quality at speed by leveraging flexible delivery models with quick feedback loops has become critical in today’s dynamic business environment. This is where DevOps incorporating CI/CD and test automation can enable businesses to quickly adapt to changing market scenarios. With digital transformation being the buzzword to enhance efficiencies and competitiveness of businesses, DevOps continuous testing has become an essential element in the transition. It helps to minimize any associated business risks and delivers superior-quality products with quick turnarounds. Let us understand the need for continuous testing in the SDLC.

Continuous testing and its importance

Quality has become the cornerstone for business enterprises to achieve customer acceptance and increase brand visibility. The traditional software development approach of testing the integrated modules of a software application after development does not make it entirely free of bugs or vulnerabilities. However, the continuous testing approach of testing early and consistently throughout the SDLC using automation can mitigate the risks and improve the quality of the product. It is important for the following reasons:

Reduces the cost of rework by detecting and fixing bugs early

Enables developers to build features quickly by automating the QA process

Speeds up the testing process as continuous test automation tools reduce manual testing

Improves test coverage as automated tests are executed quickly and evaluate all features of the software application

Enables quicker and frequent release of quality applications

Brings consistency in testing as the configured environment allows the execution of comparative tests

Enhances the value of the software, allows accurate reporting of the errors, failures, and successes of the tests, and creates greater visibility for the stakeholders (developers and testers)

Facilitates coordination among teams with quick feedback and reduces the time for code review

The key to successful continuous testing in DevOps 

DevOps continuous testing is implemented in the following ways:

Develop a correct test code: A continuous testing strategy entails building the right test script to generate accurate test results. In other words, it would mean the difference between a high-value test suite and a wasteful and erroneous one. Testers should treat the test suite the same way they treat the production code.

Plan and execute a risk-based test automation strategy: User experience can determine whether a software application will be a success or otherwise in the market. Hence, issues leading to bad user experiences need to be identified and addressed. This calls for employing a risk-based DevOps testing approach to detect, evaluate, and mitigate the issues surrounding bad user experiences.

Provide fast feedback: Continuous testing services generate vast amounts of data that provide stakeholders (testers and developers) with deep and fresh insights into issues. These also provide the management with dashboard-based intelligence or perspective to choose “go or no go” for individual features.

Maintain test data: The DevOps approach to testing can generate mission-critical test data applicable to real-world scenarios. This data can help QA experts develop insights into the need for updating the application based on the evolving scenarios, customer preferences, and cost considerations.

Access to a stable test environment: To ensure the optimal performance of the test suite, it must be backed by a stable continuous testing framework. Further, the test environments, APIs, and third-party tools should be made available to the testers without downtime or latency.

Better collaboration between developers and testers: In the DevOps scheme of things, all silos must disappear and there should be enhanced collaboration between processes (development, testing, and operations). The teams should be small in size, and all test reports should be centrally located to be accessed by the stakeholders.

Prioritize automation: Instead of removing manual testing, automation should be prioritized across processes. Thus, focus on processes that need to run repeatedly by mapping out the SDLC and identifying the opportunities for automation.

Small design: Run iterative tests on small increments that are easier to design. Small designs allow easy automation and ready deployment.

Track everything: Set up test cases with the proper metrics and pass-fail criteria. Continuous testing can identify if there are issues with the code or if things are working or not.

Use the right tools: For continuous testing, get the right tools that can run in the working environment. Use tools that have community-based support to get better use cases and solutions.

Conclusion

Continuous testing allows the execution of automated tests in the SDLC to obtain immediate feedback on errors, bugs, vulnerabilities, or business risks. It facilitates the delivery of quality software applications seamlessly.

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James Daniel is a software Tech enthusiastic & works at Cigniti Technologies. I'm having a great understanding of today's software testing quality that yields strong results and always happy to create valuable content & share thoughts.

In the DevOps approach of developing, testing, and delivering software applications, there is a need to accelerate testing within the constraints of budget and time. This entails automating the testing process as part of the testing strategy. In many cases, continuous test automation is often considered as a discrete step in the build pipeline rather than a sequence of steps. For any continuous testing strategy, all software applications need to pass through a series of tests before they pass muster in the crucible of quality. These may include unit testing, integration testing, functional testing, smoke testing, performance testing, security testing, and others. For DevOps QA testing, each of these tests should be subjected to automation to enhance quality, reduce test time, and improve the certainty of software behavior.

However, merely automating the tests left, right, and center does not augur well when it comes to achieving an optimal quality level as well as minimizing the time and costs. In the ultimate analysis, what is needed is test orchestration. In fact, implementing test orchestration can be quite rewarding given that it accelerates DevOps continuous testing and offers a holistic view of the entire testing mechanism. Interestingly, when we talk about DevOps and the ways to enhance software quality, terms such as test orchestration and automation are thrown around randomly. This can be confusing for many stakeholders not in the know.

So, is there a difference between test automation and test orchestration? The answer is yes, as test orchestration allows DevOps teams to optimize the whole test process by scheduling the execution of automated tests in a particular sequence. It is a tool to bring about efficiency and integrates both manual and automated testing. Let us discuss test orchestration and its overarching benefits in the segments below.

What is test orchestration?

Test orchestration is the scheduling of a set or sequence of automated test activities in a well-defined order to be executed one after the other. Here, the tests are executed in a linear order, and the decision to control the order of testing vests with the DevOps team. It aims at optimizing the test strategy at a holistic level and grabbing insights into the broader picture of software testing. In contrast, test automation is about individual activities or precise tasks to be executed using test scripts and tools. Test orchestration is a broader approach to testing with the application of greater thought. It fosters transparency and offers flexibility in testing software applications or certain features of them during the development phases. In test orchestration, multiple automated test activities can be executed as part of the test pipeline.

Benefits of test orchestration

Test automation seeks to streamline automated testing activities and achieve optimal quality of testing. It offers a host of benefits to the DevOps teams, as discussed below:

Increased productivity: Test orchestration helps the testing of a software application across channels (devices, browsers, operating systems, and networks) and concerns (functionality, performance, and security, among others) through automation. This removes any arbitrariness in testing based on extraneous considerations and improves the productivity of the delivery team.

Better coverage: As test orchestration focuses on automation as an objective, the coverage of automation improves. With more tests being automated, the cost and timeline of delivery can be controlled or minimized.

Easy error remediation: Test orchestration leverages a continuous testing framework to automate testing arranged in a sequence of processes. This enables the identification and fixing of errors early when the complexity of the software application is low. In the absence of test orchestration, the possibility of identifying errors later in the SDLC would have increased, making their remediation a difficult exercise.

Optimized test process: Test orchestration allows the DevOps testing team to gain control over setting up the continuous test automation strategy and test schedules. And to achieve overall efficiency, test orchestration can leverage various tools such as project management tools, automated testing tools, and DevOps tools, among others. These tools, along with a continuous testing strategy, can transform the SDLC to achieve a flexible and optimized test process.

Faster builds: With a range of automated tests set up to be executed in a sequence, it becomes easier to create a test pipeline. This hastened the execution of tests, leading to faster builds.

Shortened feedback loops: In test orchestration, whenever a certain error or concern is flagged, say security, it is only the security experts in the testing team who would be involved in verifying the results. Thus, the direct remediation of errors by the concerned people due to a shortened feedback loop reduces the test timelines significantly.

Minimize the risk of failure: Test orchestration is put into motion based on the risk assessment of the software application. It allows the creation of dedicated pipelines to address risks related to scalability, performance, security, availability, and robustness, among others.

Conclusion

Test orchestration is undoubtedly the future of QA as it allows QA experts to achieve speed and quality of testing in a seamless manner. However, any successful implementation of test orchestration would need the QA team to possess the all-encompassing tools to deliver continuous testing in DevOps.

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James Daniel is a software Tech enthusiastic & works at Cigniti Technologies. I'm having a great understanding of today's software testing quality that yields strong results and always happy to create valuable content & share thoughts.

Intense competition has driven enterprises across sectors to invest in DevOps and manage their digital systems. It helps to enhance developer velocity and enable digital transformation on a wider scale. At the same time, IT departments are embracing DevOps transformation to meet the evolving requirements of the organization and its customers in a rapidly changing digital economy. With the DevOps approach, large enterprises are able to develop software applications more rapidly than previously thought possible and keep upgrading such software applications on a continuous basis. The impact of the DevOps methodology is so apparent that enterprises having tightly coupled architectures have realized they have to either embrace it fully or be left behind. Thus, after realizing the benefits of adopting the DevOps approach, enterprises want to scale its adoption by cutting across the barriers of teams, applications, toolsets, workflows, processes, pipelines, and release cycles – both on cloud and legacy systems.

However, herein lies the catch: processes and tools that work flawlessly for use cases on a smaller scale may experience a hiccup when expanded to cover large teams and processes. This is due to the fact that the legacy architectures in such enterprises do not always allow seamless coordination among teams comprising hundreds of people and processes. What they need is an enterprise DevOps approach that addresses the unique challenges and lets them reach an agreement on the way to scale up DevOps. The DevOps methodology helps in increasing the impact and value of the digital infrastructure by combining legacy and new technologies. It allows enterprises to navigate change, derive time-to-value benefits, and lower risks. Thus, DevOps implementation should be about scaling DevOps principles and practices with quality, security, and velocity being embedded at every step of the way.  

How to scale DevOps to the enterprise level

The positives of DevOps in terms of establishing a continuous testing framework, integrations, and delivery, need to be scaled across organizations to achieve a host of objectives. It ought to be done in the following ways:  

Go for small wins and build on them: DevOps can fundamentally change the operational dynamics of an organization by breaking silos and driving everyone to work towards a common goal. This requires every stakeholder in the organization to buy into the approach or risk getting different results. The best DevOps approach would be to break down large complex projects into small, manageable entities and work. It will help the teams to learn quickly and act decisively. Teams working incrementally for smaller batches of work can identify and fix bottlenecks and achieve their objectives. Such small wins can help the team to build confidence in its ability to follow the DevOps methodology. The wins can give a boost to the project and enable the organization to apply DevOps across processes.

Management of end-to-end DevOps processes: To derive the optimum output through DevOps implementation, the platform should be manageable from a central location. To scale, there should be a single solution allowing the management of end-to-end workflow automation. With such centralized management, the organization can get clear visibility into the SDLC and other software assets. The job includes managing binaries, CI/CD pipelines, container images, risk and compliance, and last-mile deployments. Presently, several CI/CD tools allow the management of either workflows or outcomes, and not necessarily both. The DevOps platform should be able to automate and administer all processes, point tools, environments, and package types, and provide support for all technology artefacts and stacks. This allows the organization to plug into the toolset and/or legacy scripts and manage them from a single DevOps platform to achieve the following outcomes:

Consistency and traceability of the entire range of artefacts throughout the SDLC as they pass through the “development to production” pipeline. This gives a single source of validation for the entire DevOps processes and continuous testing framework, improves code quality, governance, and security, and speeds up software delivery.

Create a central repository for all binaries, DevOps testing, environments, container images, point tools, and others.

Manage risk and compliance across tools, processes, and repositories, including the ones from third parties, from code to production.

Get full visibility across the SDLC and the organization by breaking down silos or snowflake configurations. With the unified experience of working through a single platform, the organization can manage dependency downloads, deployments, pipelines, repositories, builds, and releases.

Bring every stakeholder on the same page: Most organizations have well-entrenched silos that can derail any initiative or innovation. So, even if the enterprise DevOps approach is successful in removing the silos or barriers, there is a risk of their re-emergence. This calls for motivating every stakeholder to buy into the silo-less DevOps-based ecosystem. And to do so would entail defining the desired behaviours and actions that every stakeholder is expected to perform and designing processes to reinforce the same. For instance, there may be a chance of conflicts arising if the ops team is measured only in terms of its ability to mitigate risks while the development team is measured in terms of its ability to deliver change. So, by applying inter or intra team collaboration metrics into the team and individual performance reviews, the organization can establish a common goal for everyone to work for.

Take the end-user into consideration: The ultimate objective of DevOps implementation is to deliver the best experience to the end-user. And, in the process of doing so, processes, systems, and work culture are changed and transformed. It is possible that in creating and enabling DevOps continuous integration, the sight of the end-user is lost. This should be actively guarded against by involving users in every step. Teams should take time to assess and understand the challenges, issues, constraints, and priorities of users. The knowledge so gained can be leveraged to define the KPIs or performance metrics and develop a continuous feedback mechanism.

Conclusion

Taking a DevOps approach across the organization is a long-term strategy and its success depends on the participation of every stakeholder. It is an evolving process or model that needs to be persisted with by experimenting with new ideas, capabilities, processes, and tools. Further, it is only when DevOps continuous integration is fully achieved across the organizational pipeline that enterprises can derive the best value.

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James Daniel is a software Tech enthusiastic & works at Cigniti Technologies. I'm having a great understanding of today's software testing quality that yields strong results and always happy to create valuable content & share thoughts.