DevOps proved to be a successful collaboration between the development and operations team to bring software to market, as fast as possible. The CI/CD pipeline ensured that quality accompanies speed in development.
However, as DevOps practices became advanced and software releases became more frequent, it brought new challenges for the Quality Analysis and Testing team (especially for large-sized projects). This gave rise to the need for involving the testing team in the software development cycle, leading to a new practice called TestOps (Testing + Operations).
What is TestOps and how it is going to bring a change in complex & scalable software development projects? How does the TestOps practice works to ensure that new releases and overall software functionality are thoroughly tested before they are live in production?
In this blog post, we will try to answer these basic queries regarding TestOps. Let’s get started.
TestOps: Understanding the Need
With a simple application and a small team, running automated tests might not seem to be a problematic scenario. But, when the team & application code base is large, and the application continues to grow as well, the project then needs special attention in almost all aspects- development, operations, and testing.
Some of the reasons why software development needs TestOps to include faster release cycles and the need to have speed in testing. Software development teams are pushing their codes to CI/CD pipelines. This has increased the need for a number of automated tests to assess the solution for current functionality and updates. For the software release to go live, it is important that it’s thoroughly tested. To map the speed of development with that of testing, TestOps has a role to play.
TestOps is a discipline. It helps in managing and scaling processes, people, and tests in an automation test cycle to maximize the efficiency, quality, and speed of an application.
Components of TestOps
TestOps has four major components: Planning, Control, Management, and Insights.
Planning enables the team to prioritize the tests, understand the risks involved, code complexity, and other variables that might affect the speed of testing. The testing team can determine the test goals, assess what needs to be tested, and align members to perform the test. In this phase of TestOps, developers, business owners, and the QA team collaboratively work together to make decisions.
Control refers to how the TestOps team maintains the testing standards by giving the ownership of testing to the entire organization. The people involved in the TestOps cycle are responsible for testing all aspects of testing: functional, performance, and unit testing. With regular code reviews and changes, the teams can work with standard, best practices to test the product and bring it into the market.
Management is how the teams organize tasks and processes, i.e. dividing tasks between team members, setting naming conventions, and organizing test cases in the test suits.
Insights are the information that is derived from testing. It helps to understand the effectiveness of a solution and the team’s performance. Apart from testing tools, modern technologies such as Artificial Intelligence can be adopted for better testing insights and predictions.
SUCCESS STORY: Performance and scalability testing for an India based unicorn e-commerce portal
What can be Tested under TestOps Practice?
Almost everything!
Mobile, web, and API testing can be performed through the TestOps approach.
- Mobile testing involves assessing mobile apps for functionality, usability, and performance. This can be done through regression testing (manual) or through automated test scripts.
- Web testing includes testing defects, security breaches, network traffic issues, integration, and several browser-related issues along with functionality, usability, performance test.
- API testing involves assessing the APIs from the security, reliability, and functionality aspect.
Want TestOps to be a part of your Software Development Cycle?
Regression and automation testing is a regular part of software development projects at Daffodil. For projects that are scalable, complex, and continuously grow, our QA team works in collaboration with the Operations and Development teams to ensure that the testing pace aligns with that of releases in the CI/CD pipeline.
TestOps, the testing discipline introduced by Microsoft have been doing rounds in the software development industry. Our software testing services are all-inclusive of what it takes to built-test, and release an efficient, effort-free software solution in the market.
To know how our team can help you, you can have a conversation with our testing experts. Join us through a 30-minute free consultation session where everything related to testing and your project can be discussed. Set up a meeting NOW!
