Covid-19 has hit the global economy very hard. With people
being forced to quarantine themselves and maintain social distancing, the new
normal of working remotely has taken center stage. However, digital companies
have quickly adapted to the new development or mode of working and shown the
world how things can be kept operational even when everything is closed. In
fact, digital technologies have become the enabler in allowing people to work
remotely even during such disruptions. Amid calls for maintaining social
distancing and following a ‘work from home’ model, enterprises can keep the
SDLC up and running. To do so, they may adopt DevOps software testing
and focus on embracing a culture of collaboration and learning.
The best part is that DevOps specialists can work remotely by
accessing tools from the cloud. They can ensure any Business Continuity Plan to
run unhindered. The Covid-19 is unprecedented in the sense that in earlier times,
disaster management was about fixing a site or two that had gone down. But now,
the situation demanded the entire IT architecture to be shifted to the cloud
and every employee to work remotely. The concept of DevOps, an enhanced model
of Agile, is underpinned on conducting daily team meetings and collaboration.
In such meetings, plans are made, reviews of last work are taken, and any new
challenge is acknowledged. The entire meeting is conducted among co-located
employees using tools like whiteboards. However, with Covid-19 led social
distancing norms being the order of the day, teams offering DevOps testing
services are falling back on cloud-based IT automation tools. Before discussing
how DevOps can help enterprises in dealing with the crisis borne out of a
socially-distanced world, let us know what it is all about.
What is DevOps?
An acronym for Development and Operations, the methodology is
an enhancement of the Agile model of software development. It aims at improving
communication and collaboration between the two business units by streamlining
and automating the SDLC. DevOps combines practices, cultures, tools, and
processes to scale the enterprise’s capability to deliver products or services
at quick speeds. Here the thrust is on continuous development, testing,
integration, and delivery of products after taking feedback from the
end-customers. DevOps is all about refining a software product continuously to ensure
it remains trendy and addresses the needs of the customers. Also, with security
playing a key role in any software product, every process, team, or department
within an organization should be accountable in implementing the same by
following DevSecOps.
What is DevOps software testing?
It follows the Agile way of software testing where QA works
alongside development in pre-arranged sprints. Here, a code is tested and
integrated to another module in the development phase itself by using
automation. To redefine DevOps quality assurance in a socially-distanced world,
there should be a change in approach, especially from the DevOps testing
specialists. There are as follows -
# Teamwork: In such times when you are on your own (literally) and do not have the neighbour’s
desk to ‘consult,’ you should focus more on documentation. Before going about
any job, be clear about the requirement(s) and write clear messages for your
peers and superiors to understand. If earlier, little transgressions were
overlooked due to quick and better monitoring, now the same can lead to a
logjam.
# Continuous Integration: DevOps is all about automating the testing process for obtaining optimum
results. While working remotely, a CI pipeline should be in place developed by
DevOps engineers, DevOps specialists, or anyone with the knowledge and
experience in enabling DevOps test automation. The tester should feed the code
in the CI pipeline to run the required tests. The test automation software
within the CI pipeline should test if the code conforms to the established protocol.
Such a pipeline would give results in quick time, be the code written by you or
someone else.
# Continuous Deployment: After the code transitions through the CI pipeline, it is time to merge
your code. So, your job seems to be done and deployment remains the job of the
Ops team. The latter needs to get the same back into production. So, instead of
relegating the job to the Ops team, why not make a seamless process wherein
both Development and Operations work in synchrony? So, in addition to building
a CI pipeline, one must create a CD pipeline as well. The pipeline will ensure
the code fed into the CI pipeline enters production. In doing so, you can
automate the process by setting up metrics and take care of bugfixes, future
feature development, and more automation, among others.
Conclusion
The pandemic has created an unprecedented situation where the
entire software development, testing, and delivery process needs to be executed
from remote locations. In such a distributed environment, DevOps can be
embraced by enterprises to make the process streamlined, responsive, and
resilient.
No comments:
Post a Comment