How Much Does DevOps influence Quality Assurance?

by Viktoria Byk | September 19, 2019 7:04 am

Teams around the globe are always in search of ways to improve productivity and optimize processes. Nowadays, it’s DevOps and Agile. They are focusing the team’s attention on the ways of improving the quality. In terms of QA, these methodologies make an effect on techniques, testing tools, and process itself.

One of the multiple Agile QA points today is test-driven development[1] (TDD). It begins with identifying a case (apparently stating what you need to get done). After that, you write user history and perform this test code.

DevOps makes the Agile model even bigger, bringing development and testing closer to production. That means each team member is responsible for developing, DevOps testing, and releasing the created software.

Innovations in QA team[2]: how communication is built

Big management thing is not to forget that Agile and DevOps methodologies aren’t gold tickets. It won’t work with no efforts. But some things could make it better, like, communication of the teams. It’s great for DevOps and QA teams to keep the connection during all steps on the project.

Here’s a list of DevOps and QA teams communication changes:

• There’s no “I” in “TEAM”
  It’s important to respect everyone in the team with an understanding that no one wants to ruin anything on the project. Developers shouldn’t feel hurt because DevOps QA engineers have reported a lot of bugs. The real pros know that the project is always in priority during work.

• Reality = Expectation
  As we said about the developer’s feelings, there’s a very similar situation about the QA’s ones. Basically, be ready to get a rejection on your reports. The advice that we can give you to equal expectations and reality is to use Agile. It’s inaccurate to think that these methodologies can’t live along. Their combination gives the best result: teams’ chest to chest work with a discussion of it. So, it would help you to make different scenarios about what could happen next.
  
  
• Patience is everything
  Be afraid of burnouts: you don’t need to stay till the night if you aren’t sure how to deal with the issues. Besides, it may demotivate you in the future: everyone will expect solutions from you when you don’t have them.

• We are only humans after all
  Understand that the tester works on time and budget, as the developer does. No one can create software without errors[3], otherwise testing would not exist. So your role is to help eliminate issues, not make fun of them.
  
  
• Sharing is carrying
  Be open with all the ideas! In the healthy relationships between team members, your ideas won’t be ignored. Share your thoughts! It’s better than saying nothing.

DevOps and Changes in the Test Strategy

QA engineers commit a thoughtful testing strategy to determine goals, the scope of their work activities and methods. It gives the ability to be adaptable along with handling requirements of modifications. Besides, a test strategy helps establish the obligations of the team to the quality of the product.

Testers involve different methods such as performance testing, security testing, operations testing, and monitoring with analysis part of the product in production. It allows the team to get a comprehensive view of the product and its quality.

Innovations of thinking

Every project brings testers new knowledge and skills they didn’t have before.

It means that you need more organizational skills, beneficial to predictions. Meantime, in the past, the focus of QA was solely documentation of defects. For now, it focuses on taking and using automated data to identify the probable reasons for these issues and where they may appear another time.

Influence of creativity

To try every part of DevOps methodology[4], QA engineers include factors of organization, so they could deploy assessment to the software development cycle. It means taking the obligation to make high-level decisions for strategic on testing and it’s quality. So, now we have:

1. QA can participate in a Scrum, dividing the entire scope of tasks into sprints.
2. Script test responsibility or having tools to use in the testing process’ arrangement.
3. Chance of creation a consulting or teaching group to give skills and working on strategic quality.

Continuous Testing and Continuous Integration (CI)

Nowadays, testers have more work than search for bugs only. They should also understand the business logic of the application and the business goals of the company. But even this doesn’t protect from the gap of communication between DevOps and QA teams. Often the reason for this is the qualms about the modern role of quality assurance in the software development cycle.

Integration with the test process combines as well as supports the overall approach. QA in DevOps methodology quickly provides production code for DevOps commands. As a consequence, they provide the tools and infrastructure they need to ensure a smooth secure process.

So what are QA checkpoints in the DevOps circle? Well, here they are:

• the work is done according to expected standards;
• automated testing should be code-coated;
• automation testing fixtures should be properly matched to the continuous integration DevOps cycle.

For better accuracy, DevOps needs to automate all testing processes by properly configuring them for deployment without any interruption. Specialized test automation and CI tools must be available to achieve this goal. We are at QATestLab set up and configure the testing environment for CI using Hudson, Jenkins, Travis CI, Bamboo, and others.

DevOps Automation

It supports the release of the product’s high-quality in a quick period. It expects constant continuous deployment, testing, development. Along with DevOps help, the team makes the update of delivering.

Various tests work on a code change to ensure the quality of the program. The DevOps process forces the Dev and QA teams to collaborate for work, where QA can log in for automation of the whole program process of delivery.

Automation of Delivery process:

• QA delivery configuration
• Code Management
• Continuous Integration (CI)
• Reports of artifacts
• Testing framework

QA takes a big part in bringing forth a product’s quality for the customer. During it, the team’s acts are done to make the process of development more synergetic with the process of testing by engaging with DevOps.

We at QATestLab hope that we answered the question “what is DevOps”, giving you the understanding of the DevOps process. Check other useful information in our blog.

Related Posts:

• Initiating Automation Testing in the Digital Era: Decoding Its Significance and the Wisdom of Vendor Collaboration[5]
• TOP 10 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Startups You should Know[6]
• Continuous Testing and Test Automation: What is the Difference?[7]

Source URL: https://blog.qatestlab.com/2019/09/19/devops-influence-qa/

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