Agile and DevOps are for harnessing integration, interaction, and innovation.― Pearl Zhu

In this blog, I am going to share how to do testing in DevOps and useful techniques for the same.

DevOps is a combination of Development and Operations. It requires a high level of collaboration between development and operation teams and this collaboration is responsible for determining the success of DevOps for an organization.

How To Do Testing in DevOps?

When we start implementing any new process such as DevOps, which is entirely different from the traditional methods followed for many years, the first thing that needs to happen is educating the team with the new process and how it impacts the existing testing process. Since, in the traditional waterfall model, the testing team will get the build at the end of the development and then the testing will happen. Earlier, QA was an independent entity and they functioned independently. But in DevOps, QA needs to align with the development and deployment team. The DevOps slogan is, “Everyone involved with delivering software is responsible for delivering high-quality software.” In short, the delivery becomes a shared responsibility. So, we have to keep this in our mind during test planning.

DevOps is as much about culture as it is about tools, and culture is all about people.

The QA team needs to add automation tests into the build pipeline. QA’s activities are as below:

• Identify the test cases based on the features rolled out in the build after collecting the inputs from the development and business teams.
• Prepare the test scripts based on the inputs.
• Configure the test scripts and add them to the pipeline.
• Before configuring the scripts to the pipeline ensure that the test/staging/production environments are set up with the correct test data.
• When a build is committed, the tests will be executed and if all the test results pass, then the build will be deployed to the system. If the test results fail, then it will be rollbacked.

The below image shows the key activities of the testing team in DevOps.

Useful Techniques

We will see some of the useful techniques to do testing in DevOps.

• Be curious and Learn about continuous testing concepts.
• Agile and DevOps are integrated. To learn more about Agile Testing, Visit this blog “How to do Agile Testing”.
• Prepare yourself to change your mindset from working in silos to working together.
• Collaborate with the team to make the QA successful in a DevOps environment.
• Prioritize tests based on the inputs collected from the multiple stakeholders of the project. Everyone should agree upon the selection of tests.
• Focus not only on test pass, but also on efficient designing of tests.

To know additional tips for testers in DevOps, refer to my article published in the testingindevops.org community.

References

“Building a DevOps Culture” – Mandi Walls
“What does continuous testing actually mean?” – Lisa Crispin
“Test Automation in DevOps, Test Automation U” – Lisa Crispin