How DevOps should be implemented to ensure a good UX

Devops Testing

The business imperative of achieving customer satisfaction has necessitated the seamless functioning of both development and operations teams in a cohesive manner. This move beyond Agile has enabled businesses to achieve the twin objectives of delivering more software releases and enhancing their quality at the same time. The adoption of DevOps initiatives has brought in concepts like Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Testing (CT), and Continuous Delivery (CD). And of the three, Continuous Delivery has been found to be quite a challenge for businesses.

The minefield of implementing DevOps

The difficulties in achieving a seamless CT are manifold. These range from leveraging multiple tools, teams, services, and experts as opposed to the use of tools and teams for CI/CD. Moreover, implementing DevOps requires the adoption of total quality culture by people, processes, and technologies. And in a silo driven organization, this can be a minefield to tread especially when legacy systems are needed to be married with the latest technologies and methodologies. This is where implementing DevOps testing becomes paramount.

Adopting DevOps does not mean overhauling the entire IT architecture of an organization. On the contrary, it harps on achieving a greater communication and collaboration between teams. The task becomes even more challenging when there is regulatory compliance to be met without changing the overall organizational structure.

In most business set ups, the development, testing, and operations teams operate in silos with different job descriptions and responsibilities. However, implementing DevOps in the Agile testing agenda would entail each of these departments to work together with a unified purpose. However, before delving into the ways to achieve the above objective, let us first know why DevOps as a methodology was conceived.

Reasons for the emergence of DevOps

  • The varying needs of a modern IT organization related to quality, scalability, accelerating time to market, and customer experience are difficult to achieve in the presence of multiple teams functioning with different priorities, cultures, and goals.

  • Lack or poor communication and collaboration between the development, testing, and operations teams.

  • A faster pace of growth of digital technologies as opposed to the slower pace of teams in adopting, implementing, and managing them.

Implementing DevOps in the Agile Testing agenda

If Agile is about developing and delivering glitch free products in the market by adopting the first test approach, then DevOps goes a step forward in offering a rich customer experience throughout the product lifecycle. It does so by providing incremental updates to the application from time to time. And to ensure the same, the following steps are needed to be taken.

Implementing DevOps test automation: The key to this lies in selecting open source tools such as Selenium to get away from scalability issues arising out of licensing constraints. This way a dynamic regression testing can be carried out faster with the generation of release notes. The DevOps specialists can create suitable test cases traceable to the code files and test scenarios based on application changes.

Implementing a quality culture: Since a traditional organizational setup has siloed departments with varied priorities, processes, and goals, a DevOps testing strategy should involve all stakeholders to imbibe a total quality culture. According to this culture, quality will not be the sole prerogative of a particular department but of everyone concerned (including business analysts and management.) The processes of each department should be aligned to ensure quality deliverables for the customers. This is of utmost importance as DevOps calls for the merging of expertise, best practices, and thought processes across functions in the SDLC and beyond. A ‘system thinking’ needs to be inculcated across departments wherein each team should be aware of the action of the other and quickly deliver high quality software with less or no glitches. 

Implementing Continuous testing/integration/delivery: Since a software product is not static and needs updation from time to time to meet the technological and business challenges of the day, it needs to undergo continuous testing a la DevOps. Continuous testing entails the execution of end to end automated tests and receiving constant feedback from users on the quality of the product. It can provide insights into the probable business risks that a software can face when released into the market.

Conclusion

DevOps should be implemented in right earnest to ensure a software product stands in good stead as far as delivering a good customer experience is concerned. It should involve the use of test automation tools to ensure the delivery of a risk free software for customers.


This Article is originally published at Medium.com, How to implement DevOps in the Agile Testing agenda?

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