Summary: This article discusses the impact of DevOps methodology on the quality assurance process within software development, emphasizing collaboration, automation, continuous integration and delivery, and customer focus.
Software is the backbone of today’s businesses and organizations. There’s a critical need to deliver software products faster, more securely, and with fewer bugs. In response to this challenge, many teams have turned to DevOps as a solution.
Development operations, or DevOps, is a software development methodology that combines development and operations teams to create a more streamlined and efficient software development process. It emphasizes close collaboration, automation, continuous integration and delivery, and agile development practices to ensure high-quality software products are delivered faster and more efficiently.
The successful implementation of DevOps requires a carefully crafted strategy, and organizations must understand how to integrate DevOps practices into their existing development process. How exactly can an organization find this perfect balance, and how can your organization effectively leverage it? Read on for the key information you need.
How Does DevOps Methodology Impact the Quality Assurance Process?
Because DevOps aims to deliver high-quality software products faster and more efficiently, to best align with customer expectations and requirements, teams need to make some changes to their typical QA processes. Some of the most notable impacts include the following:
Collaboration
DevOps emphasizes collaboration between development, operations, and quality assurance teams to ensure a streamlined and efficient software development process that takes their schedules and preferences into account.
Automation
DevOps relies heavily on automation tools and practices, which can reduce the time between development, quality assurance, and deployment of software. This ensures that software is tested thoroughly and consistently throughout the development process.
Continuous Integration and Delivery
DevOps incorporates continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) practices, which enable software teams to release new features and updates to customers quickly and frequently, often during the initial development cycle. This helps teams keep up with changing customer needs and market demands.
Customer Focus
DevOps puts a strong emphasis on testing and developing from a customer’s perspective, with QA teams working closely with stakeholders to ensure that software is delivered on time, at a high quality level, and with the required features and functionality.
Tips to Find the Right Balance of Quality Assurance and DevOps
It’s one thing to understand the theory behind DevOps and QA’s role in it; it’s another to understand how to implement it effectively. Here are five tips to jumpstart how your team brings the best of DevOps to reality.
1. Foster Collaboration
Collaboration between development, QA, and operations teams is critical because all teams work together to ensure that software is delivered on time and with high quality.
2. Utilize a Test Management Tool
Use a test management tool to help with preparing, facilitating, and tracking the QA process. These tools have built-in features to boost collaboration, a test case library, reporting, custom user interfaces, and dashboards.
3. Don’t Skip Important Tests
Even though testing is more integrated into the development process, don’t bypass the various forms of testing. This includes security, end-to-end testing, integration testing, acceptance testing, and more.
4. Automate Testing (Within Limits)
Many teams lean on automated testing frameworks to expedite and streamline QA. These frameworks can ensure consistent testing, speed up testing cycles, and reduce human error. However, remember that automated testing is not a silver bullet. It has its own limitations and requires its own testing tools, cases, and approaches.
5. Balance Automated and Human-Led Testing
Although automated testing can be a useful tool, also focus on more complex testing scenarios that require human intervention, such as exploratory testing and usability testing. This ensures that the software is thoroughly tested and all potential issues are identified and resolved before deployment.
Bringing It All Together
By adopting DevOps practices and weaving in QA best practices throughout the development process, organizations can deliver software more quickly, securely, and reliably, all while staying more responsive to changing business and customer needs.
DevOps isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. It requires established testing structures, robust test management tools, and plenty of collaboration to implement successfully. Once these elements are locked in, DevOps can help organizations achieve software development goals and stay ahead of the competition.
Want to learn more about how to make your organization’s QA process more effective, no matter how mature your program is? Download TestMonitor’s resource, QA Testing: A Helpful Guide for Software QA Professionals.
