Planning Your Quality Strategy in Today’s DevOps World

With Agile, DevOps, and CI/CD becoming commonplace, the software development procedure is faster than ever, with large expectations for the user experience and overall software quality. To keep up, companies are adopting a “shift left” approach that integrates quality assurance into the engineering method, promoting QA teams and their position in development. Once siloed away from the design, product, and client experience teams, QA is now a highly collaborative discipline that requires an effective approach to tackle their increasing list of responsibilities. Championing a practice of quality in DevOps.

The biggest change encompassing QA in a DevOps world is adjusting to a developing role: as they “shift left,” QA requires to focus less on the minute features of every test and more on establishing a broader culture of quality. 

As QA becomes a key partner and advisor to a product, consumer success, and engineering teams, test automation tools become a crucial factor in assuring that quality engineering can succeed. In order to raise their focus, reliable solutions are required to decrease the burden of manual testing. 

Break down to a build-up 

Developing an entirely new testing culture across a business is a tall order, even if your company is undergoing the shift to DevOps. Our expert panel presented their best practices for assuring QA is able to grow and adapt. 

First, begin small. Transitioning from manual testing or even better automating testing tools is a significant change. As you adapt to an intelligent testing platform, begin with small tests that enable your team to become familiar with the tool’s abilities and how it will affect the testing approach. Once you have that first small set of tests that are important and reflect crucial user paths, you then verify with project managers and developers for feedback. Once you have that good stable set installed, you can build the checkpoint in your pipeline. This procedure assures that the entire DevOps pipeline is invested in the new testing process from the very start, which is particularly crucial when rebuilding trust or breaking down siloed workflows. 

With the initial set of proven tests in order, you’re able to develop on that foundation and resume creating other tests. You’re also in a good place to add more sophisticated statements to the proven tests as you continue to combine intelligent test automation into the complete DevOps cycle. 

Be an educator and a student 

Shifting to DevOps and a culture of quality needs embracing the double role of student and teacher. As a QA leader leading your team through the change from manual testing or Selenium testing to intelligent test automation, you require to be able to continuously analyze and examine best practices. Ideally, work with vendors that have the resources to support your organization through the transformation through online help resources and live support sessions. 

People work in organizations that combine software testers, developers, and product people in various teams depending on project requirements. As a result, testers require to be continuously educating various stakeholders on how to integrate quality into the development process. 

Planning for the future of DevOps

With a stronger focus on education, collaboration, and clarity, QA teams are fully prepared for the needs of DevOps. With efficient intelligent test automation tools, QA can shift their role from pure testing to an advisory role that combines customer feedback and testing data, to a vital role that eventually elevates a culture of quality throughout their organization.

Report QA’s Strategic Value, Not Test Results

Traditionally, testers have stated the results of their tests by metrics like tests passed vs. tests failed, the number of defects discovered, and requirements reached. While these test results are an excellent way to measure the team’s performance and a product’s pre-release readiness, they don’t communicate the deeper value of QA to the company in the way that requires to occur in a DevOps environment where quality is everyone’s responsibility.

As a result, testers require to shift from reporting on these types of test results to reporting on a more vital level that communicates how testing is growing. For instance, try reporting on how automation efforts provide to bugs discovered in testing, the team’s growth toward automating more tests, how testing performance improves by release, how development and test teams are colluding to decrease the turnaround time to fix problems and validate fixes and how the testing team is expanding coverage (and thereby diminishing risk).

Focus on Test Optimization, Not Test Automation

Test automation is absolutely essential for a fast-moving DevOps environment, but it’s crucial to think about the larger picture too. Test automation solely will not resolve all of your manual process difficulties. Instead of concentrating entirely on how to accomplish your desired level of test automation, try thinking about how to optimize your entire testing strategy.

Think of it this way: If you purchase a Ferrari to go fast but end up using only backroads rather than the highway, you won’t get to your destination any sooner. Concentrating entirely on test automation without taking steps to optimize your DevOps testing approach builds a similar condition because you end up utilizing an efficiency-driven tool in the least effective method possible.

In contrast, practicing test optimization efforts should help enhance efficiency by obtaining the correct mix of the unit, integration, and functional automation adjacent to manual and exploratory testing. To discover this mix, testers must recognize and report on areas of risk and use the time to analyze test plans, including test creation, test execution, and amount of testing.

TestUnity simplifies automating functional tests by enabling testers to use their apps like their users would create tests. If you’re interested in learning more about how TestUnity is making a difference for QA teams stay tuned to our blog. 

TestUnity

Testunity is a SaaS-based technology platform driven by a vast community of testers & QAs spread around the world, powered by technology & testing experts to create the dedicated testing hub. Which is capable of providing almost all kind of testing services for almost all the platforms exists in software word.