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/

 

Redefining DevOps Software Testing in a Socially-distanced World

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.

The QA imperative of a DevOps cycle

With customers taking the lead in determining the success of a software product in the market, enterprises have their task cut out. They can no longer afford to give short shrift to quality while focusing on faster releases alone. In traditional QA, siloed departments often work at cross purposes to each other and render the overall quality of a product less effective. So, to transform the whole QA value chain and deliver outcomes like speeding time to market, increased collaboration, and the delivery of a quality product, DevOps QA takes center-stage. The latter helps to streamline the functioning of silo- driven departments by driving a culture of collaboration.

What is DevOps and what are its benefits?

DevOps combines Development and Operations wherein the thrust is on automating the processes between the two teams. DevOps QA facilitates the development, testing, and release of software, quickly, reliably, and cost effectively. It is underpinned on building a culture of collaboration between the traditionally silo-driven teams. Here, three distinct elements in the whole ecosystem viz., people, processes, and products are integrated to deliver value to the end customers. With DevOps testing services, the entire SDLC is streamlined and accelerated to release applications or services within quick turnarounds.

The various benefits of a DevOps driven build-test-deliver pipeline are as follows:

As enterprises root for digital transformation to stay competitive and deliver the best user experiences, DevOps specialists are looking into the end-to-end product cycle. They do so with the aim of enhancing the quality of software at a lower cost.

·         Quick fixing of glitches: In the shift-left scheme of development and testing, a code does not move beyond a point until it is tested for various parameters. This results in quick identification of vulnerabilities or glitches and their resolution/mitigation. Thus, the clean code is passed on to the next module or cycle for integration.

·         Streamlined processes including automation: As DevOps quality assurance goes about breaking silos around teams and streamlines their processes, the quality and speed receive a boost. DevOps test automation stays central to the entire activity as codes are put through automated test scripts for validation. Also, automation can run repetitive processes iteratively leading to the quick identification of glitches.

·         Better engaged workforce: With DevOps test automation taking up the load of running iterative tests, testers can be deployed elsewhere. The testers can better utilize their skills in activities where there is a scope for innovation. The engaged workforce can ultimately benefit the organization with activities that can keep it competitive.

·         Collaboration: In traditional QA, teams across the organization generally do not go beyond their remit. This approach often results in ignoring issues, glitches, or vulnerabilities when the product module moves across the pipeline. Since glitches can get into the software at any point in the SDLC, everyone in the organization should be made accountable. There should be a change in culture wherein every member cutting across departments or processes should ensure the product moving through their part of the pipeline is devoid of glitches. Such collaboration can lead to the identification and removal of glitches thereby improving the overall quality of the product.

·         Continuous integration and delivery: Arguably the ultimate outcome of DevOps where a product can be upgraded based on the feedback from customers or the market. In the real world, customers may come across issues in a product, which did not find traction during development. The operations team must keep their ears to the ground and listen to the feedback. The same should be passed on to the development team for correction. The product pipeline should have a loop of continuous integration and delivery to ensure the quality of the product remains top-notch.

Since the ultimate aim of DevOps is to render the development and delivery of a product glitch-free, QA should be an integral part of the cycle. In other words, DevOps without QA is a recipe for failure. Let us understand this with an example. With faster time to market being one of the objectives of DevOps, enterprises may release a product without proper QA. Since a comprehensive round of QA testing involves checking the usability, functionality, security, and other aspects of a product, the overall quality suffers.

So, even if the customer receives a product quicker than others in the market, its lack of quality can mar the user experience. The quality issues again force the product to be fed into the development pipeline. This entails additional cost, time, and effort on the part of the team. So, on one hand, the product does not receive any goodwill in the market, on the other, it leads to the accrual of additional expenses for the organization. In the competitive world of business, these shortcomings can prove to be the undoing of enterprises.

QA is everyone’s responsibility

In DevOps software testing, ensuring the quality of software is treated as everyone’s responsibility. This does not, in any way, imply that the QA team becomes redundant. Rather, it underlines that quality has to be ensured at every point of the SDLC and beyond. Every team and individual within the team should take responsibility for the quality and stability of the product. QA should assume a more strategic role of establishing a robust testing architecture or/and offering an oversight of QA.

Conclusion

To ensure QA remains an integral part of the whole DevOps-led SDLC, it should sit at the core of the build rather than being treated as an afterthought. To be at the top of your game and make the product stay clear of the competition, DevOps should be implemented across the SDLC.