Role of QA in the Age of DevOps

DevOps can be defined as an extension of the agile software development approach which enables simultaneous software coding and testing along with continuous collaboration among the concerned departments. In today’s era, organizations are transforming from traditional methodologies of software development and testing to the most modern approach of DevOps. The rapid adoption of DevOps is to accelerate the time to market and to meet the upcoming customer needs. Enterprises today are accepting it widely to attain competitive and rapid business growth.

DevOps is Agile and it removes all the obstacles to deliver high-quality software in the hands of customers. Once a smooth process for agile development and continuous integration is developed, automation of the deployment process becomes necessary because it fulfils the following objectives for which the managers crave:

[ Must Read: How CI (Continuous Integration) Makes Testing Process Easy ]

# Fast-track time to market

# Improved quality

# Increased organizational effectiveness

# Stable operating environments

# Early detection and faster correction of defects

# Transparency across the teams

# Continuous testing, release and deployment

DevOps is an agile approach that highlights rapid, small, iterative development and deployment of applications. It is driving enterprises to get well-organized and speed up the delivery of applications along with changes and innovation. In a DevOps environment, the role of the QA is to feed new development code to the production environment. DevOps teams provide all the necessary infra and tools that are required to make the deployment easier and at the same time ensures that the changes are made as per the defined needs.

Traditionally, the role of QA is to detect bugs. But in the DevOps age, the major responsibility of QA is to prevent the bugs from occurring in the first place. In the DevOps environment, test automation is specifically recommended.

It is not wrong to say that ‘Quality’ is icing on the ‘DevOps’ Cake. QA plays a number of roles and responsibilities in a DevOps scenario:

1. Each member of the QA team takes the responsibility for identifying problems in the product as well as in the process. Suggestions and recommendations from the QA team lead to the continuous delivery of quality software.

2. It is the responsibility of QA to maintain continuous software improvement and software quality throughout the SDLC.

3. QA testers influence both the developmental and operational processes. They not only find bugs but look for any opportunity to improve the quality of software through the software development process.

4. QA should focus more beyond web testing because even a small non-functional defect if introduced into a critical transaction process on an e-commerce website can halt the business. Many organizations are moving towards automated functional testing and the same practices are being applied to other areas of testing such as security testing and performance testing. Load testing and stress testing are the two critical disciplines for DevOps organizations.

5. The role of QA and testing teams should not be just limited to manual functional testing. They should try to become a part of technical teams. They should focus more on automation and testing strategies.

6. Quality needs to be well-defined in order to meet the specified requirements. It is good to achieve perfection in software but the accomplishment of satisfying user experience within the given time period is also something where QA needs to look after.

7. QA with the help of software testing metrics detects the software defects early in the development cycle.

8. The QA team members should have well-defined optimized goals. Organizations need to strengthen necessary behaviour by encouraging quality assurance.

9. The teams should have strict and specific requirements. QA teams should involve themselves proactively in the requirements process in order to help and guide the development teams towards a proper direction.

10. More focus should be on manual and automated regression testing especially on critical areas such as key software functionality.

11. QA & testing has to move towards the use of automation tools to automate testing wherever possible. All the teams such as Development, operations, and QA teams should be facilitated more and more to communicate, collaborate, and optimize their efforts.

12. Continuous integration is the key to identify defects early in the software development lifecycle. For continuous integration to be implemented effectively, all the stakeholders need to integrate their work often on a day-to-day basis.

13. A fully automated continuous testing process needs to be integrated into the SDLC for a successful continuous delivery process that minimizes risks, reduces costs, and also accelerates the time to market by frequent releases.