Role of test automation in your DevOps environment
Testing is essential to the SDLC, and faulty testing can lead to poor-quality products. The objective of developing a product is to ensure delivery that meets customer expectations. Enterprises that keep up with the latest testing tools and practices are the ones that will have the edge over their competition. These are the enterprises that adopt test automation and make it integral to the development and delivery process. And using automated testing helps achieve continuous testing, which is the core of a DevOps environment. Moreover, it helps reduce costs and increase productivity.
Role of test automation
DevOps brings the deployment and release activities closer to development and testing. And the role of test automation in DevOps is significant as it uses automation frameworks and tools to create scripts to verify the application's functionalities.
Test automation makes testing faster by cutting down the time taken in manual testing. It also reduces the resources and frees up manual testers' time to work on other aspects of the SDLC. Moreover, test automation reduces human errors. The entire testing process is simplified and more reliable through automation test tools.
A DevOps environment supports continuous testing even as the product is developed. Unlike the traditional testing practices that initiated testing after the product was deployed, a DevOps approach integrates operations and the development in the same cycle. Test automation tools are integral to implementing continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), and continuous testing (CT).
DevOps environments aim to achieve speed and agility. Therefore, it is critical to automate the testing processes so they can continue to run automatically. It requires a mature automation testing framework and depends on the coordination of every team involved in the SDLC. Several special automation tools for testing enable continuous testing and integration to produce quality products. For instance:
● Open source or commercial testing tools
● Tools that support CI and DevOps tool integration
● Offer informative and accurate test reports
Test automation in DevOps requires certain best practices to be effective. And, it is essential to have a clear understanding of the project requirements, including the scope and whether it is a web-based project, desktop, or mobile.
Best test automation practices in DevOps
Using Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
Infrastructure as code is used to automate the infrastructure for releasing software and is common in a DevOps environment.
Use of CM tools for continuous integration
Configuration management (CM) tools come together with development tools to inspect the code's readiness for production. This involves continuous feedback from testing and development teams, making it easier to resolve any issues within the code.
Incorporating test automation only where necessary
Test automation is essential to achieve quality code as it offers regular and frequent testing without much manual intervention. Test automation in DevOps helps developers fix bugs in the code during development enabling the DevOps framework to speed up the software development lifecycle. It also removes the need to perform repetitive test cases by the testers. However, tasks such as exploratory tests still need manual testing.
Upskilling the existing team
While automation testing tools play a pivotal role, it will be a wasted investment without skilled testing engineers. Therefore, it is best to upskill the existing testers to use automation tools.
Benefits of test automation in DevOps environment
Automation testing plays a major role in DevOps and ensures several benefits to the enterprise.
● Accurate test results to ensure quality deliverables
● Increased speed of test execution
● Rapid feedback cycles to reduce the time and cost of fixing defects
● Enables automation of steps that can be automated, leaving only the remainder to manual testing
● Shorter test cycles
● Removes repetitive and tedious tasks
● Parallel testing with development to reduce time and errors
● Shift-left approach enabling continuous testing and reducing feedback loop.
Testing is executed parallelly with the development stages to leverage the CI/CD approach with the shift-left approach. Adding automation testing to DevOps helps the operations and development teams to ensure that iterative updates are deployed faster to production.
Wrapping up
DevOps has changed the QA landscape by opening up the development process to all the stakeholders, including operations and development teams. Automation testing empowers the SDLC with agility and speed to consistently meet evolving customer needs for high quality. While test automation does not replace manual testing, it is still the most useful to execute tests that are repetitive and prone to human errors. Moreover, it is the only way to ensure continuous testing throughout the SDLC. Enterprises of all sizes need to pay close attention to the role test automation plays to achieve quality at speed.
QMetry is a quality platform designed for Agile Testing and DevOps Teams to build, manage, and deploy quality software faster with confidence.
QMetry test management provides the complete agile testing solution with complete test management, test automation, powerful quality metrics and analytics.
