Let’s dig deeper into the DevOps testing strategies and understand how it contributes as the best testing strategy for software development life cycle.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. With time progressing, technology is transforming at a lightning speed to make the software development process much simpler, faster, qualitative, and convenient. Technologies like machine learning and AI are being utilized in several ways, not only to process qualitative and faster data but also to process predictive data. Having said that, the software development lifecycle has also evolved extensively since the last decade. Although agile is the go-to development process used by most of the development team, but since the introduction of DevOps, teams are either opting for Agile+DevOps or even implementing only the DevOps methodology. The basic difference between Agile and DevOps is that Agile refers to an iterative approach that focuses on collaboration, customer feedback, and rapid releases while DevOps brings the development and the operations team together to manage the end-to-end engineering process. DevOps, especially in the area of testing products, brought a paradigm shift! In this blog, we will dig deeper into the DevOps testing strategies and understand how it contributes as the best testing strategy for software development life cycle. DevOps is such a term that doesn’t have a definitive definition, however, those that do attempt to define it seem to get it right because of its varied understanding. DevOps cannot be termed as a software development methodology, or a site of tools, etc, it is a philosophy to bring the development, testing, operations team together in order to meet the need for shorter and more frequent software deliveries. This helps the organizations to focus more and respond frequently on the changing business requirements. DevOps also focuses on regularly optimizing the workflow, architecture, and infrastructure in order to deliver high-quality applications, this process majorly constitutes into DevOps Cultural Shift. The goal of most DevOps projects is to automate as many manual processes as possible. These manual processes do offer roadblocks in speedy deployment. This is caused by the lack of shared ownership of the end product which is contrary to the basic agile process where the cross-functional agile teams are equally responsible for the quality of the product or the success of the project. This causes the agile DevOps team to perform testing by the entire team, be it developers, testers, or operations team. In the DevOps model, testing is done continuously, at the earlier stages of the development lifecycle, often, and even after the applications are in production. The goal of every DevOps strategy is to build, test and release software faster and frequently. In an organization you might get these two scenarios, where either you start fresh where the coding culture or development pipeline is not yet established or where the development or testing practices are already established. In the first case, where the coding practices are yet to be formulated, automating your software delivery pipeline would be the first step. If you are successful in creating a Continuous delivery pipeline then you would be ahead of your competitors as you would be the first one to deliver higher quality software in the hands of the clients and users, faster than your competitors. Also, you would be able to respond to the clients‘ demands and changes more rapidly.
