In today's cutthroat software development environments, DevOps facilitates seamless collaboration and communication between development and operations teams.
In DevOps, the two teams collaborate and share duties in order to accomplish their main objective, which is to provide high-quality software more quickly and frequently in order to meet changing client expectations. Utilizing pertinent tools and technologies in conjunction with DevOps methods encourages firms to complete work as quickly as feasible.
Frequent software releases are supported by some DevOps approaches, such as Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD). This means that throughout the whole software development lifecycle, testing is essential to maintaining software quality.
Features of testing in a DevOps environment
Over time, as Agile began to gain popularity, software testing underwent significant changes. Subsequently, the testing domain has seen the introduction of quicker and cooperative testing techniques, instruments, and technologies.
This is what testing in a DevOps environment looks like:
Testing is a continuous and automated process that enables continuous and faster delivery of software.
Testing spans every stage of the software development lifecycle (SDLC).
Each step of the SDLC involves different forms of testing. This minimizes backtracking in the case that you’ve detected an error.
Testing is no longer the responsibility of one team. Shared testing responsibilities allow everyone to understand the impacts behind each change.
DevOps adopts Shift Left Testing Approach
The Shift Left testing methodology is adopted by the DevOps culture, which is noteworthy since it differs from traditional setups where testing occurs at the end of the development process.
Testing is pushed to the left, or the early stages, of the software development process using shift left testing. When development begins there, testing also begins at that point. This method aids in finding bugs as soon as feasible.
Software quality is greatly enhanced by these built-in components of a DevOps testing environment. However, the effectiveness of the testing strategy hinges on how successfully companies apply DevOps best practices for testing.
DevOps Testing Best Practices
We'll go over some testing best practices in this section that businesses should implement to get the most out of DevOps.
Leverage test automation (smartly)
Developers usually merge the code to a common repository in a DevOps environment. This indicates that continuous integration (CI) is used to update the code continually. You must constantly test the code using several test kinds to reduce the possibility of errors, such as:
1. Tests of units
2. functional examinations
3. Tests of acceptance
4. Integration examinations
You can automate these tests as a best practice to receive feedback on continually integrated code more quickly and early. Higher percentages of automated test cases and integrated automation suites are characteristics of more effective DevOps teams.
As you move through the SDLC, test automation expands beyond the code level to include domains such as:
1. Testing APIs
2. Testing of performance
3. Testing loads
4. Tests of endurance
This does not imply that all aspects of the testing scope ought to be mechanized. There must to be room for manual testing as well. It's crucial to use cautious. You're just automating and adding additional waste to the process if you automate a test procedure that isn't worthwhile.
Recommendations for effective test automation include:
1. Using good, quality test data
2. Identifying test cases that are good candidates for automation
3. Running test cases in parallel to improve automation speed
4. Continually revising the testing plan with an up-to-date automated testing scope
Teams can often create and run more test cases to prevent bugs by utilizing test automation intelligently.
Identify test automation engineers
Although all teams share responsibility for testing, companies often leverage the specialized knowledge of test automation engineers to boost the proportion of test automation coverage. For instance, reaching automation goals would require a committed group of these engineers.
An effective engineer for test automation could be:
1. A manual tester by trade who later became proficient in automated script writing
2. An automation engineer by training turned software developer
The organization's entire automation plan is developed by test automation engineers. They bear accountability for:
1. Determine test scenarios that can be automated
2. utilizing a selected test automation framework to create automation scripts
3. Choosing the tool that most closely matches the testing strategy used by your group or company
The automation engineer usually assumes responsibility for running automated tests on the relevant environment and reporting any issues found during a software release. After that, they collaborate closely with the development teams to identify fixes for such bugs. They have to clean up the current test cases in accordance with the latest system modifications as part of their job.