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Author: Komal Lopez

  • The Human Value in Automation-Driven DevOps Testing

    The Human Value in Automation-Driven DevOps Testing

    Enterprises are embracing DevOps underpinned by automation to ensure the quality of software across all digital touchpoints. In fact, automation has become the crux of continuous integration and delivery, the vital DevOps testing goals. Without 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 a greater number of stakeholders in the process of delivering value by linking the silo-based teams. It may not be the best practice, but it’s a discipline of people-centric management. Continuous delivery is the technical foundation of DevOps automation, which extends to the agile foundation as well. The 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 current business model, more and more companies are embracing the DevOps practice to drive the automated deployment of software. We are shifting toward an organizational culture in which development and testing take place simultaneously, quickly and more often. This helps maintain consistently high ratings on the quality of software with faster turnaround time. The main agenda of DevOps testing is to derive quality outcomes all along the software development life cycle (SDLC) 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:

    • Enhance the reliability, re-usability and quality of all components.
    • Save costs of upgrades and maintenance.
    • Improve the rate of success for standardized processes to ensure the rapid delivery of applications.

    Automate Everything — Is It Even Possible?

    With the help of the DevOps approach, developers automate and accommodate operational activities, from the source code commit to operational productivity. 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 and is not operational without human intervention. It is the DevOps testing specialists who are responsible for the process to run flawlessly. 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

    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. Before the DevOps approach, the perceived lack of interest by the development team regarding maintenance and operations used to affect DevOps testing and business goals. However, this scenario has since changed due to an organizational shift toward automation and DevOps testing.

    The gap between the silos of operations and development no longer exists with the arrival of DevOps. It has removed the boundaries of several organizational roles. Teams are required 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 requires human intervention. Automation cannot substitute the decision-making process of humans, for the latter has become vital across the organizational ecosystem as, and when, needed.

    Omit One-Size-Fits-All Approach in DevOps Testing

    Automation cannot be viewed as the eliminator of roles. The organization still requires expert knowledge and skill set 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 ensure the delivery of superior quality products.

    Continuous Monitoring, Testing and Improvement

    One of the key agendas 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 it’s 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 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.

    — Komal Lopez

  • How Can DevOps Enable Your Software Testing efforts?

    How Can DevOps Enable Your Software Testing efforts?

    Changing market dynamics are pushing the need to include DevOps in your software testing exercise to help meet business objectives in providing a consistent and flawless user experience.

    Digital transformation is not an easy task for business enterprises. There are myriad issues to conquer, such as department silos, legacy systems and a well-entrenched work culture that often refuses to align with the business goals. Needless to say, the imperatives of reaching out to the market quickly and with quality products often are not achieved because of these issues. To eliminate the bottlenecks that end up blighting business enterprises, a growing number of organizations are adopting DevOps, which involves an end-to-end automation of processes, be it for development, testing or deployment.

    DevOps takes the Agile methodology a step further by involving all the stakeholders of an enterprise. The DevOps testing strategy encompasses continuous improvement of software products to address the changing customer preferences.

    In DevOps software testing, the aim is to detect and eliminate glitches proactively to reduce the cost and time to fix issues that can lead to a poor user experience. In the highly competitive digital market, a poor user experience can stymie a business’s market readiness.

    However, businesses should realize that the DevOps software testing approach is a journey and should be leveraged to enhance the user experience on a continuous basis.

    What’s the Key Value Expected from DevOps?

    Considering that the development and operations teams of an enterprise each have different work cultures, systems, goals, tools and approaches, the quality and delivery schedule of applications can be thrown off. Hence, the significance of DevOps testing strategy comes into play to bring synergy between the teams and to enhance the quality and delivery of applications consistently.

    DevOps calls for the integration of development and operations teams, wherein QA is made everyone’s responsibility. The synergy helps in breaking the departmental silos and posits the role of QA as an enabler of value addition and to achieve customer delight. This not only ensures quality, but also enables faster turnaround on application development process. Ultimately, enterprises are better equipped for the changing market dynamics and challenges with their business applications.

    Key Drivers to Adopt DevOps

    George Spafford, research director at Gartner, said:

    “A DevOps initiative must focus on business requirements and not on ‘doing DevOps for the sake of DevOps,’ wherein the methods and tools become more important than what customers need. Organizations must avoid the all-too-common mistake of launching a DevOps initiative before establishing that a business reason exists to do so. For example, instead of focusing on release rates and doing things faster, start with the business value by asking what that will enable.”

    Hence, it’s important to work with a DevOps strategy that resonates with the business objectives. These are some key drivers for considering DevOps.

    • Quick deployment of quality applications across devices, platforms, operating systems and networks.
    • Increasing competition necessitating the faster release of apps.
    • Emerging technological platforms whetting the appetite of customers for better products.
    • The emergence of complex applications with footprints in the physical and virtual world.

    How Does DevOps Enable Effective Quality Assurance?

    • It makes QA a collective responsibility rather than being assigned to a single department or organization.
    • It enables better collaboration between teams through a shift of culture.
    • It ensures faster identification and elimination of glitches.
    • It is responsible for accelerating the time to market and keeps a tab on the software quality through customer feedback.
    • It provides continuous improvement of software through timely releases.
    • It reduces cost due to the absence of rework.
    • It optimizes the utilization of resources and prevents waste.
    • It helps to cut down the software development life cycle (SDLC) by adopting quick sprints.
    • It ensures continuous development, testing, integration, deployment, monitoring and innovation of applications.

    The Need to Measure DevOps

    Digital transformation has necessitated the need for rapid innovation, development, testing and deployment of applications. Post deployment, appropriate customer feedback should be considered and absorbed into the product to improve its performance further. The success of DevOps QA depends on the level of automation, not to speak of the degree of collaboration among various stakeholders.

    In fact, enterprises should use a robust automation software to execute quality assurance across platforms and devices. The automation software should be able to test the code as part of the development sprint on a variety of devices and test environments. The DevOps QA approach should be measurable based on certain metrics to ensure its effectiveness. The measurement platform can include the following:

    • The QA team dealing with continuous integration should be able to work with all the tools to find out glitches.
    • The entire setup should be simple to facilitate quicker learning, adoption and execution.
    • The test data including dependencies should be easy to access.
    • The entire build, deploy, release, verify and rework processes should be streamlined.

    Conclusion

    In the fast-changing digital landscape, the objective of reaching out to the customers quickly and with better quality of products is paramount. This is where the DevOps specialists turn things around with continuous improvement, innovation and deployment.

    As Gartner’s Spafford rightly stated, “DevOps challenges conventional IT thinking with its lack of a standard definition and approach, its constant evolution, and its requirement for acceptance and management of risk.”

    — Komal Lopez