Importance of DevOps in Software testing
In this compelling blog post, we delve into the indispensable relationship between DevOps and software testing. Exploring how the integration of development and operations profoundly impacts the efficiency and effectiveness of testing processes, we uncover the transformative power of DevOps methodologies in modern software development.From accelerating delivery cycles to enhancing collaboration between teams, we examine the myriad benefits that DevOps brings to the testing landscape.Join us on a journey through the intersection of DevOps and software testing, and discover why this dynamic synergy is a game-changer for organizations striving to achieve greater agility, reliability, and innovation in their development workflows.
Preeti Tripathy
5/10/20242 min read
"Importance of DevOps in Software testing", does the title sound odd to you? DevOps stands for amalgamation of Development and Operation, then where testing stands in this equation? This question arises because of the traditional mindset of software industry processes. One mindset suggests testing is just one step of software development and another mindset says that testing is a separate processes compared software development. Both the statements are partially correct and hence do not justify the true meaning of software testing.
Software testing is the process of evaluating and verifying that a software product or application at any phase or stage of the software lifecycle. Hence both the above statement holds true, it is a part of software development and it has its scope beyond the nuclear development cycle as well. Hence testing has its hands in business domain, software development domain as well as operation domain. And that is the very reason why DevOps understanding is important for software testing as well.
When DevOps was initially introduced it was mostly around CI/CD which stands for continuous integration and continuous development. But in true sense DevOps is should be defined as "a set of practices intended to reduce the time between committing a change to a system and the change being placed into normal production, while ensuring high quality". However, the term is used in multiple contexts. At its most successful, DevOps is a combination of specific practices, culture change, and tools. Hence the new age DevOps tools like Azure DevOps not only focus on CICD, rather give other facilities like Board(for project management), Wiki(for documentation), Repos(for version control), Pipelines(for CI/CD), Artifact(for storage), Release Tracker(for Agile Release management) etc.
Testing starts from the beginning of software development lifecycle and end at its last stage of maintenance. As DevOps is involved in every phase of SDLC, it is important for all label of software testing(static testing-at requirement gathering to alpha and Beta testing-at post production).
At the invent of automation testing DevOps is even more important for test engineers in terms of CI/CD as well.
DevOps test framework:
A DevOps test framework is a system operated within a continuous delivery toolchain that controls the orchestration and automation of resources for test setup, test execution, and test results.
Let us take Azure DevOps as an example. The test engineer should have understanding in following areas of DevOps
1. Board for project management and defect management. Tester must know how to create new work items of different types
2. Wiki documentation and linking these documentation to respective work items
3. Sprint and backlog management
4. Access to development repo for peer review and creation of test automation repo and linking the PR(Pull request) to respective work items
5. Pipeline creation, setup and maintenance for test automation and its integration with Repo(version-control).
6. Maintenance of Release tracker for seamless agile process
7. There could be test case management external tools which can be integrated with the DevOps tool. Also manual test cases can be pushed to Repo in various file format(most desirable BDD-Cucumber- feature file format)