DevOps is a buzzword that is quickly becoming the mainstream method for developing software. It aims to expedite development while cutting costs and increasing productivity and efficiency in your company.
We are all aware of the importance of software testing and how it can revolutionize a business by assisting in the delivery of high-quality software products to clients in less time. Manually executing test cases and evaluating the quality of each line of code at each level of the Continuous Delivery process is unfeasible.
According to a recent report in 2021 conducted by Code Time, engineering teams continue to face hurdles and inefficiencies during the software development process. According to the survey, developers are dealing with a variety of distractions on processes and systems, ranging from too many interruptions to too much delay or communication hurdles. This is when DevOps continuous testing enters the equation.
Enabling CI/CD For Your Enterprise Systems
The process of implementing continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) generally involves two major aspects:
- Developing the right mindset toward CI/CD throughout the organization
- Picking the right tools for the job
Let’s discuss it a bit:
Adopting the Right Attitude to CI/CD approach
Before jumping on tools, thinking from a developer perspective is just as crucial as choosing the right CI/CD tools even if you don’t relate to development. To be effective with CI/CD, you must understand how to automate and change your existing procedures. You must also be able to collaborate closely with developers.
For establishing successful communication with the development team, it is important to understand what are the various stages of development an individual or team had to go through while developing a piece of software. These stages include, for example, research and analysis, architecture, design, coding, testing, and release.
Picking the Right Tools for the Job
Currently, there are a variety of CI/CD tools accessible on the market. It’s critical to know what your goals are and what you want to accomplish while selecting the proper tool for the job.
Some relevant questions that you could ask yourself:
- What elements of your application, will you wish to integrate?
- Do you require deployments? And how many individuals will be involved in the code’s development?
When you estimated what features you want to include in CI, it’s easy to decide which tool is ideal for your project. Hiring the correct set of DevOps professionals, in addition to tools, may help you efficiently arrange things and make decisions.
In case you are still in some doubt, consulting with experts who worked in this field for decades could be the best solution.
Congratulations, you’ve finished half of the job so far. The first part of the approach is to integrate CI/CD into your development process; the second half is to ensure that your firm is doing it correctly. Here are some best practices that organizations may include in their CI/CD process to save operating costs and increase DevOps efficiency:
- Developers should establish a pipeline that runs from code check-in to testing to production. Because both developers and testers know what stage the code is in, they will be able to collaborate more effectively on the process.
- Setting up an array of automated release gates for each environment is the easiest method to accomplish this. This will help to ensure that all bugs are identified before they are introduced into your production environment.
- Enterprises should also keep track of how long it takes jobs to run in CI/CD settings so that you can improve the overall process. The longer something takes to run, the more expensive it becomes — and the less time your team has available to develop new features or resolve faults.
Continuous Testing Challenges & Ways to Overcome Them
Even after the successful implementation of Continuous Testing in the DevOps process, it’s not uncommon to see organizations facing several challenges. Creating an effective automation system is a challenging endeavor that necessitates a significant investment. Furthermore, enterprises lack the scalability infrastructure required to perform tests continually. Additionally, without effective coordination across the product, development, and testing teams, this appears to be considerably more difficult.
Tackling these challenges is indeed hectic but if you follow the below key points then it might be easier to overcome such issues in the future:
- Challenges arise due to miscommunication or any kind of cultural and communication barriers. By enabling effective coordination, collaboration, and understanding of various scenarios in the SDLC team, in short, proper management is all its needs to break such roadblocks.
- The emphasis should be on keeping it simple and logical while reducing superfluous and expensive testing strategies. Instead, the energy might be directed towards more relevant test objects, yielding far superior and measurable findings.
- Feedback is really important in maintaining the quality of the end product. By putting testing at all the levels of Quality Assurance (QA) and development it would create a continuous feedback chain to developers for software improvement.
- Automation can make it easier to deploy Continuous Testing in DevOps. Although perfect automation is not possible, the more process automation is achieved, the easier it is to carry out Continuous Testing.
- The final considerable point is enabling intelligence programs and harnessing the power of artificial intelligence for solving complex problems and thinking beyond automation at each software production delivery stage to boast the software development life cycle (SDLC).
Originally published at https://www.impactqa.com on May 26, 2022.
