How is QAOps different from DevOps in Software Testing

 

With quality being considered the prime differentiator for a software product to be accepted in the market, stakeholders (management, developers, testers, and operations) have their task cut out. They not only have to ensure the quality of the product at the time of delivery but also keep it updated even while the product is being used by the end-users. This means pursuing a cycle of continuous improvement and delivery where everyone in the ecosystem needs to be accountable for maintaining the quality of the product. This is where DevOps kicks in with its focus on reducing the time between developing a software product and the business realizing its benefits.

This calls for increased collaboration and communication between teams, namely, development (those who develop and test the product) and IT operations (those who operate the product). In such scheme of things, Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) are the vital pillars. Thus, with DevOps, business enterprises aim at the rapid and consistent delivery of high-quality products. These products, in turn, are expected to offer higher customer satisfaction, thereby guaranteeing the success of the product in the market. And given the popularity of DevOps, a few variants have emerged, with QAOps being one of them. In a QAOps framework, QA (Quality Assurance) is integrated into the CI/CD pipeline instead of existing as a silo-based process divorced from development and operations.

What is QAOps?

Since Quality Assurance (QA) plays a critical role in the development and delivery of a software application, it is logical that QA and Operations collaborate as a business practice. Thus, QAOps focuses on improving the software delivery workflow and making it stable, robust, secure, and faster. In short, it takes the critical aspects of continuous testing in DevOps such as CI and CD, and brings the siloed teams together.

Why QAOps?

Although less popular than DevOps, QAOps is fast emerging as a crucial methodology to pursue in the delivery lifecycle. In fact, in QAOps, the QA team holds a pride of place that a development team holds in the SDLC. The benefits of employing QAOps in DevOps implementation are as follows:

Better quality: With QA being integrated into the delivery workflow, the final product is of higher quality than what it would have been if traditional methodology had been used. As an integral part of the CI/CD workflow where extensive automation is used, faster results are achieved leading to higher customer satisfaction.

Better productivity: With QA getting much more involved in the development lifecycle than before, there are frequent interactions with other teams. This ensures the QA team is valued more in the organization resulting in boosting their confidence and productivity.

Increased skill level: When the QA team works with other teams (development and operations) as part of DevOps software testing, it allows them to expand their horizon and increase their skill level.

Better customer experience: As QAOps incorporates continuous testing, there is a higher degree of quality, stability, and reliability of the product. This ensures superior experiences for the end customers.

What are the differences between DevOps and QAOps?

Although QAOps is a derivative of DevOps, there are a few differences between the two.

Quality at the core: In DevOps testing services, the collaboration is mainly between the development and operations teams broadly ensuring the final product is free of glitches. Here quality or QA is part of the development process and assumes a ‘secondary’ role in the larger scheme of things. In a DevOps testing strategy, the DevOps specialists mainly comprise developers, testers in a secondary role, and members of the operations team. Thus, even though the main thrust is on quality, the QA specialists remain in the background. However, in QAOps, the operations team mainly communicates and collaborates with the QA team to ensure the continuous delivery of products. Here, QA is not subsumed by the development team but remains an equal stakeholder in the entire value chain. The ultimate result of implementing QAOps testing is to continually deliver superior customer experiences.

Cultural shift: The main thrust of DevOps is to ensure the software is deployable at any point in time with new features in place. Here, every stakeholder should act as part of a single team working toward a common goal. DevOps calls for the development and operations team to function as a single unit aimed at delivering business value across the value chain. In QAOps, the main thrust is to ensure the quality of the application in terms of its performance, scalability, functionality, security, and usability, among others. And since the singular focus in QAOps testing is on achieving the quality of the software application along with the speed of continuous delivery, the quality of the application is of the highest standard.

Conclusion

QAOps or Continuous Testing in DevOps seems to be the next logical step in the implementation of DevOps. It ensures the primacy of ‘quality’ in the SDLC and goes a step further than DevOps in ensuring the quality of the application to remain top-notch on a continual basis without compromising the speed of delivery. 

 Article original source:

https://www.softwaretestingmaterial.com/

 

How does Security Testing help in validating the Healthcare Ecosystem

 

The healthcare ecosystem’s dependence on digital technologies to deliver better services to patients and other stakeholders has made it vulnerable to security threats. If statistics are to be believed then healthcare companies across the world are going to cough up a whopping $6 trillion in damages due to security breaches in 2020 (Source: PhoenixNAP.) Modern-day healthcare applications store sensitive patients’ data, which has often led to medical identity theft necessitating the need for rigorous software application security testing. The critical patients’ data may include identity details, payment information, bank account details, history of morbidity, and insurance details, among others. The breach of any of this information can be lethal and devastating, both for the patients and the healthcare facility. 

Why is the healthcare security system important?

Cybercriminals are targeting critical patient information to steal identities using methods or tools like phishing, malware, or ransomware. To pre-empt such attacks a robust application security testing strategy needs to be put in place with the following guidelines.

•  Top-most priority to be given to ensure security for the vital facets

•  The application security testing methodology should remodel the framework for data security, verification, audit logging, and many more

• The other aspects of security testing would include business logic testing, data validation testing, session management testing, DOS testing, Ajax testing, configuration management testing, and OWASP   testing to check for vulnerabilities such as SQL injection and XSS.

What are the types of healthcare security testing?

Security testing covers a range of tests to verify and validate the robustness of the healthcare application and its ability to fend off various security threats.

Penetration testing: In this type of testing, ethical hackers try to gain entry into the healthcare application by exploiting its vulnerabilities. The process performed manually or using automated testing, gathers information about the application in terms of the possible entry points. Thereafter, the hacker attempts to break into the application and verifies its level of system protection.

Application-level testing: Also known as app-level testing, the technique ensures the software application doesn’t execute any malicious actions. Here, specific security-related scenarios are validated by conducting functional testing.

DDoS testing: In this type of interactive application security testing, simulated DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks are conducted with real traffic to understand the level of protection offered by the application to thwart DDoS attacks.

Security code review: It mitigates potential security vulnerabilities in the software code early on and prevents costly and time-consuming fixes later. It serves as a final review to check the application’s safety before launch.

How does software application security testing benefit the healthcare domain

Security testing for the healthcare domain gives insight into the robustness of the healthcare application and its ability to face cyber threats. The benefits of employing software application security testing include:

Protecting PHI: This type of testing Identifies and fixes all vulnerabilities associated with Protected Health Information (PHI) and checks if PHI complies with the HIPAA standards.

Data storage validation: It checks if the data storage mechanism, in encrypted or plain-text form, is safe and secure. Besides, it analyses the security solution, encryption methods, and data management techniques and helps to detect any security issues with the application’s database.

Data transmission validation: Software applications transmit data across cloud, mobile devices, and email, which should be properly encrypted to prevent any unauthorized access at any stage.

Identity validation: Detects vulnerable access points that could be exploited by hackers, especially the areas covering identity management. The software application security testing helps to mitigate any breach of patient privacy and strengthen the mechanism for identity management.

Risk assessment before deployment: Once the application with security-related vulnerabilities is deployed, it may cause havoc in the form of security breaches. The application security testing services offer the opportunity to identify and fix all security-related vulnerabilities in the application. This ensures the application is bereft of any security issue and protects the customer from carrying out any type of financial transaction.

Builds trust and confidence: Security testing ensures the application is compliant with the HIPAA standard. This helps to build the trust of your clients in the application and boost its brand equity.

Conclusion

The cybersecurity dimension is expanding at a phenomenal rate coupled with growing incidences of security breaches. To restore customer confidence and prevent such incidences, healthcare security testing should be conducted rigorously.

Why should e-commerce businesses leverage a TCoE?

 

E-commerce is growing at a phenomenal rate with the expected sales to reach $ 4.13 trillion in 2020 and $ 4.9 trillion in 2021. This is a direct result of the parallel penetration of smartphones and the internet. The seamless and omnichannel experience delivered by e-commerce portals make them attractive for the customers to embrace this model. However, this growth is creating high level of competition among various players with customers veering towards those who deliver the better customer experience. So, how do e-commerce players up their game and remain competitive? The answer lies in embracing a standardized e-commerce application testing process.

What is e-commerce testing?

It is the testing of an e-commerce application and its various features and functionalities. E-commerce testing helps identify and fix bugs in the application before it is released to the customers, thus ensuring conformity to the client requirements. E-commerce mobile app testing validates various functionalities in terms of their performance, security, and usability, among others. The objectives of e-commerce app testing are:

• Ensuring the quality, assurance, and reliability of the app
• Ensuring optimal capacity utilization and performance
• Improved time to market
• Ensuring the security of customer data
• Predict customer behavior during peak loads
• Enhancing customer experience through glitch-free and high-performing application

Bugs and glitches can mar the customer experience in any e-commerce application and impact the sales volumes. So, rolling out superior e-commerce applications and portals at a rapid pace is crucial to keep a business competitive. The e-commerce domain faces a slew of challenges as mentioned below:

• High operational expenses and low-profit margins
• Unable to leverage the best available technology
• Addressing the needs of the new-age customers

To enhance its capacity, security, and sales volumes, the e-commerce industry needs to integrate:

• A multi-channel approach
• Knowledge about the target customers, their preferences, and browsing habits
• Right technology platforms
• Superior customer experiences

Challenges faced in e-commerce domain testing

The e-commerce providers face a number of testing challenges in their pursuit of delivering superior customer experiences.

• Prevalence of legacy applications
• A plethora of POS applications
• Multi-device and multi-channel environment
• The need for round-the-clock uptime for POS
• Demand for rapid and continuous delivery
• Security

The above challenges notwithstanding, the e-commerce sector requires robust and reliable software systems to drive complex business processes. To ensure the testing procedure is not impacted by these challenges, a Testing Centre of Excellence should be used.

What is a Testing Centre of Excellence (TCoE)?

Comprising standardized testing processes, necessary tools, metrics, and human resources, a TCoE operates as a shared function across the organization. It enables the organization to achieve a higher level of QA maturity, drive test automation, and ensure better test outcomes.

Why does e-commerce domain testing need a TCoE? 

The sundry benefits to be derived by e-commerce businesses in adopting a TCoE are as follows:

Optimal operational efficiencies: The QA processes followed in disparate departments or functions within an organization do not always follow a standard template. This can create issues due to the inconsistent test outcomes generated across the value chain. The issues created in any non-standard e-commerce mobile app testing may include defect leakages, wastage of time and effort, reduced productivity and efficiency, higher test expenses, and missed deliveries, among others. A Testing Center of Excellence, on the other hand, can offer a standardized testing process within the organization. This may lead to fixed guidelines for test planning, writing test cases, using tools, and execution.

Greater transparency: In the absence of a TCoE, the e-commerce business would be unable to track the test expenses and returns thereby allowing inefficiencies to set in. Leveraging a TCoE that uses metric-based tracking, the business can measure the performance of the test process in terms of effectiveness, test effort, test coverage, defect identification, and test ROI.

Support DevOps: A TCoE can help the QA team to be in sync with the latest technologies and trends, and deliver a competitive edge to the organization. Also, a TCoE can speed-up test automation and ensure quality across the CI/CD value chain.

Expanding test coverage: The QA team involved in any e-commerce website testing possesses limited project visibility – a significant challenge to get scale economies and optimize test resources. A TCoE ensures the open-source test resources are already deployed and ready to be extended for any team and at any time.

Better alignment to organizational goals: A TCoE serves as a repository of all testing functions, processes, tools, and people, operating towards a common organizational goal. It precludes the QA team from working towards a project goal alone and serves the quality standards expected of the organization in the eyes of the customers or clients.

Conclusion

Even though a TCoE might call for some investment at the initial stage, the benefits can more than make up for the investment and delivering good returns. It helps to make the metric-based QA process more agile, innovative, scalable, efficient, fast, and cost-effective. 

Original Source:

https://dev.to/