The need to build a strong automation strategy to meet DevOps objectives


Enterprises have taken to digital transformation in a big way in order to meet the rising customer demand for better products and services. The need of the hour for them is to remain competitive by reaching the market faster with quality products. In fact, pursuing the latter objective holds much more significance in meeting customer expectations. Given the plethora of choices customers have they may like to expand the product range and try out new offerings.

However, the products they are likely to stick with will be the ones that are well tested and quality assured. The advent of DevOps has been to address the twin supposedly opposite objectives of ensuring faster product cycles and quality. The thought process behind DevOps is to include all the stakeholders in an enterprise, namely Development and Operations to include ‘quality’ into their rigmarole. As a successor to Agile, DevOps goes a step further in following testing as a part of the development sprint.

DevOps talks about continuous integration and delivery of products through continuous testing. According to this approach, a product needs to be evaluated on the yardstick of quality throughout its usage cycle. Thus, not only a product should go through rigorous quality testing during its development phase but even when it is being used by the customers. As applications become more complex they are needed to be updated from time to time. And carrying out such upgrades in real time is one of the crucial features of continuous testing a la DevOps.

The demands of faster release cycles and continuous testing have necessitated the use of DevOps test automation.

However, DevOps test automation can go wrong as well if not followed through by using the right automation strategy. Besides, the initial costs of automated DevOps testing can be intimidating for enterprises. Many organizations end up spending a considerable amount of time, money and effort in implementing the automation of DevOps quality assurance. However, when it comes to realizing the fruits of DevOps they often end up getting scalded. The objective should be to build a strong automation strategy to address the need for continuous integration and delivery.

Why is a strong automated DevOps quality assurance strategy needed?

Realize CI/CT goals: To achieve a faster product development cycle, the code must be tested throughout the SDLC phase and beyond. Only test automation can achieve repetitive testing of variables across systems, platforms, frameworks, browsers, geographies and networks.

Reduces QA costs: Notwithstanding the high initial cost of deploying a suite of test automation software, it can have myriad advantages. These range from the reuse of scripts and the requirement of fewer testers to a better identification and elimination of glitches, and increasing the throughput. 

To set the right test cases: It is not possible to automate every single process. The key is to identify the areas and processes where the automation of DevOps software testing can bring viable results. Moreover, keyword based tests can work better and faster as opposed to a complex script based test automation software. The areas that are needed to be chosen as test cases can cover repetitive tests, high risk, large data sets, and testing across browsers, platforms, and environments.

Early testing: DevOps testing specialists can write test scripts alongside developers. This results in an early detection of bugs and subsequent cost savings due to the absence of any rework. On the other hand, the late detection of bugs can result in significant cost escalation in altering the code from scratch.

Future proofing: Many times, DevOps testing specialists change the testing architecture or the tool to meet the testing requirements of the day. This can have an impact on the costs. The test automation process should choose a tool that is platform agnostic. 

Transparency: Test automation includes the use of a better reporting mechanism. The scripts, variables, objectives and outcomes are shared across the dashboard leading to transparency. The test results, be it in the form of a success or failure, are available for viewing by each and every stakeholder.

Conclusion

By adopting the right automated DevOps testing strategy, quicker product development and deployment cycles can be achieved at cost effective rates. The challenge is to write automated test scripts that stay relevant over a period of time.

This Article is originally published at Medium.com, Why should your DevOps testing team build a strong Automation strategy?

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