When one examines the present drift toward DevOps, it’s quite evident that more and more organizations are implementing this software release model with the intention of enabling automation in software deployment. DevOps affords the framework that allows teams to move forward software on a more frequent basis. The conventional idea of a “software release” dissolves into a uninterrupted cycle of service improvement over time.
In most software development organizations, QA is considered a function separate from development units. Indeed, testers and developers have their own roles and responsibilities to take care of. However, QA and development teams should sync very closely to achieve common objectives of delivering a single, robust application that functions and behaves as per agreed standards.
Why DevOps?
With more and more organizations adopting DevOps practice to support automated software deployment, we are moving towards a culture where build and testing must happen rapidly, simultaneously and more frequently. This helps maintain software quality checks on a continuous basis with faster time-to-market. High quality is deeply ingrained in DevOps operations and cannot be treated as a separate stage.
What is the role of QA in DevOps?
QA has always been seen as a “gatekeeper” for software deliveries. However, in a DevOps environment, QA is part of the process itself since there are no boundaries between development and operations leading to Agile results unlike a traditional environment where development and operations are separated functions and operations team fixed issues raised by development teams.
In DevOps organizations, QA pushes out new development code to a production environment and DevOps teams provide infrastructure and tools to make the deployment process easier while simultaneously verifying that the changes are functioning as per the requirement.
In a traditional QA focused organizations, quality assurance teams focus on finding bugs while in DevOps organizations, the responsibility of quality assurance is not limited to that but to prevent them from arising in the first place. This approach helps in an environment where there is a need for newer releases every few minutes or hours. Here, manual testing is simply ruled out as an option and test automation has to be deployed.
Hourly releases are very common if we consider the release environment of an eCommerce portal. In this case, load, security and stress testing become critical and DevOps practice can help manage better quality releases since quality is an integral part of DevOps. This helps to identify and fix issues before new code goes live on the portal while checking for performance when it’s live.
Summary
DevOps helps achieve continuous improvement throughout the development cycle of a software product as QA teams can simultaneously identify issues in processes and recommend improvements wherever necessary. To know more about our how eInfochips (EIC) can help you build a DevOps culture in your QA and Test automation practice, drop us an email at marketing@einfochips.com
