Role of Continuous Testing in the DevOps Era

In the current business environment, fierce competition has compelled organizations to adopt an increasingly agile approach to proactively respond to dynamic market shifts. In addition to this, rising customer expectations demand quality services in shorter delivery times. In order to keep their head above the water in this challenging scenario, enterprises are focussing on revamping their development methods to achieve faster release cycles and accelerate time to market.

There is no progress without change, thus, companies have adopted new approaches like DevOps to tackle ever-changing market needs.

What is DevOps?

In traditional IT companies, developers, testers, engineers, and operations, play distinct roles. Such a siloed approach impedes completion of deadlines as several glitches appear right before release. Issues are discovered only after the product has proceeded to the subsequent team for quality checks. For example, only after developers complete coding, can the QA team work with their testing plans. Consequently, defect identification is delayed as the development team works on rectifying errors again only after QA.

Thankfully DevOps eliminates this lag and enables IT organizations to create, test and release software updates frequently and efficiently. DevOps, as the name suggests, is an amalgamation of both development and operations. The fundamental principle of DevOps is introducing a cultural shift in the organization by encouraging cross-team communication and collaboration.

But the question is does the DevOps approach undermine QA functions?

No, it doesn’t. The significance of QA teams rests in their preference of quality over time. However, as businesses want faster and shorter testing cycles, a new kind of testing method was developed called Continuous Testing.

Continuous Testing- Aligning DevOps and Test Automation

Continuous Testing is an uninterrupted testing mechanism where the product moves through shorter and continuous feedback loops. Hence, the code is constantly developed, tested and deployed. At each stage, the auto-feedback process triggers the next step in the delivery cycle.

Continuous Testing is Essential For DevOps Success

DevOps requires agility in both development and testing. The foundation of DevOps principle is based on Continuous Testing by collaborating Continuous Integration with Continuous Delivery. As the code is improved, changed and integrated at each step with feedback, it is successfully sent for QA without errors. Testing teams then check for performance after which the code is delivered to Operations for post-production. The Operations team runs stability tests to monitor application environment.

Since Continuous Testing checks every aspect of the code, test automation becomes an important facilitator in furthering the entire process.

Summing Up

A close intersection between development and operations, and by automating testing and deployment, IT companies can deliver on the dual promise of increased operational agility with speedy time to market.