How is Test Automation Supporting DevOps' Success?

Everything about DevOps involves creating a culture to sustain operations and development. The DevOps developers make these things come together to test, build and deploy software solutions without a high cost or time factor. DevOps also makes Quality Assurance completely obsolete as it gains ground.

How is DevOps related to QA?

Quality Assurance finds complete usage at the cascading or waterfall development (or deployment). However, it is not quite sure how it is suited for Agile and DevOps. The terminology and concepts confuse most people. They add it into themes like continuous integration, continuous development or continuous delivery. However, you can look at it somewhat differently.

This is when test automation enters the DevOps scenario. The volume of tests is rising substantially today. Here the regression runs take place at night or through the weekend. Since there is such a massive volume of testing, automating testing becomes necessary.

The DevOps consulting services can definitely help you to create the infrastructure to let you enjoy a sustained development and deployment cycle. You cannot succeed with DevOps without their help, particularly if you run your tests manually. The number of test cases is simply too many, and you cannot run them manually.

Test automation becomes a shared courtyard

Quality concerns everyone when it comes to DevOps. This might be great news if you hear about it. But, in the realm of development, or any job, you should take care of it as the administrator or management. When something is everyone’s problem, or you share the responsibility among multiple personnel, no one takes the initiative to handle it. This can be dangerous because no one inside the organization wants to take responsibility for it.

Automation testing will not get itself done. Anyone who has done it in the past can tell you how complicated things can be in the beginning. One of the most complicated things to deal with is the creation of the test cases. You can get in touch with DevOps consulting services and get the necessary help. They will help you to create a setup where you can do the rest. But when it comes to internal responsibility, you will need to allow someone personally to take care of the job.

Personnel include QA testers and test automation engineers

Any DevOps developer will find out that test automation can be a tough skill to master. The process has technical complexity, and it often turns out to be the major pitfall for the DevOps projects. If you want to be a test automation engineer, you would need to understand the underlying technical landscape in minute detail. Along with that, you should know about the test automation tools and application functionality.

You should know how you can create the scripts in parallel with the development procedure. You should also learn to execute the scripts with the help of the CI/CD tools. Not only that, you would even need to have proper coordination the operations as well as development. If you do not have experienced test automation engineers on the payroll, you will have three options to choose from:

Get consulting companies and work with experts – There are some amazing DevOps consulting services around the world. You can get started and find the right talent for the job pretty easily. However, there is a problem with this approach. The costs will rise significantly, and you will need to depend on external vendors for your projects.

Hire a team who can do the job – The number of such engineers in the market is scarce. You will need to be very patient if you want to have the right people working for you.

Retrain the existing testers and turn them into automation engineers – You might need some time if you do not already have the right personnel. However, you can develop your team and let them grow the right skills.

Read more: Role of DevOps in Custom Software Development That You Must Know About

What is next in the journey?

If you are a DevOps developer, you will know how important it is to communicate with the test automation engineers and create a culture. Both the testing and development need to continue parallel to each other. In this way, test automation engineers can develop the perfect test scripts and maximize coverage. The CD tools support the code and the scripts. You can generate the builds automatically, deploy them or test them.

Having a more strategic approach is possible. You need to involve people with management and technical experience. This is how every DevOps development company does the job. You would need to define the quality strategy in line with the DevOps culture.

You also need to fine-tune the requirements and determine the strategy in the cases when it is not possible to involve automation testing completely. You would need to define the quality metrics and continuously measure and analyze the metrics. At this stage, you are no longer finding the bugs but trying to prevent the bugs altogether.

The entire process might seem quite challenging, but the process does payback. DevOps will offer a better path, and the whole business would make a better software solution. Automation testing will be one of the key players in the success of the project. If the test automation goes right, it will be an indication that you are a mature DevOps developer. Even if there are challenges, you will definitely be able to find success.

Why should you involve automation testing in the process?

One of the painful facts is that in spite of the advancements in the field, the testing domain lags behind. The manual tools do not meet the needs put forward by the accelerated development process in action today. Automation is offering a lot of benefits to DevOps development due to the following reasons.

Boosted Acceleration

DevOps and Agile initiatives solely aim to accelerate the development and deployment procedure. Test automation is a step in that direction. However, there are still a lot of organizations who have not adapted to this norm. The rest of the software delivery pipeline is optimized. However. The testing becomes a bottleneck. You can significantly increase delivery and conversion rates with the help of test automation.

Reduced risk

If the software fails, the business fails. There is no need to emphasis on how important the end product is for the company. No DevOps development company can ignore the fact it is impossible to test everything before the release. In such a case, you will need to assess the overall impact on the user experience. In the next step, you determine if the released candidate has an acceptable amount of risk.

Low testing costs

If you are trying to retrofit the outdated testing processes, there can be high costs. Most of the companies try to solve the problems with the help of testers. You can reduce the spending by creating tasks that put you at a competitive advantage. Many  app development services will help you to create ‘scriptless’ test automation and cut down the costs.

With all of these measures in place, you can enjoy success in your DevOps development business. When it comes to DevOps, you cannot focus only on a single part of the infrastructure. The success lies in properly maintaining the system.