It has become crucial for software development companies to be competitive and satisfy client demands in today’s fast-paced, technologically changing environment. The typical waterfall software development technique needs to be improved for firms to stay on top of the market in this setting. Despite its advantages, it frequently generates subpar apps and causes delays in time to market. This has compelled companies that produce software to adopt alternative techniques, notably those based on Agile and DevOps development processes.
DevOps is an extension of the Agile development technique that enables continuous stakeholder cooperation to run software development and testing in parallel. Many believed that the QA position was no longer necessary with the advent of DevOps and that the development team could create any application or product independently. Without a QA team, organizations started to see a decline in the quality of their applications and lower ROIs. Due to this, firms have had to restructure responsibilities, adopt a shift-left strategy, and reinstate the QA function. The traditional QA function, however, could work better with DevOps. The QA role is evolving into Quality Engineering to support current and future technologies and to align with DevOps (QE).
Since quality is the primary focus of the Quality Engineering profession, it is more rigorous than QA. Your proficiency in all DevOps areas directly or indirectly relevant to product quality, such as software testing, automated testing, Agile processes, CI/CD, etc., is required for the QE function. To aid the team in producing high-quality products, quality engineering personnel should also have a solid understanding of design methodologies, the technological stack, delivery methods, etc. Since the DevOps team engages in a wide range of activities, including working with business analysts, developers, stakeholders, and customers and creating test automation frameworks and test scripts, QE must be a crucial component of the team.
By ensuring that all test cases are automated, and that test coverage is at least 90%, the QE team must connect their efforts with the DevOps cycle. The main emphasis is on automating configuration, deployment, and testing while also coordinating these processes with the Continuous Integration Cycle. This calls for cooperation and coordination between several groups (development, QE, operations, and so forth). All testing procedures should be automated and set up to launch automatically after deployment is finished. The environment and deployment procedures also need to be standardized, according to QE.
Beyond automation, QE must concentrate on obtaining test results more quickly by correctly designing the test strategy and using the proper tools.
When developing the test plan, the following actions should be taken into account:
To gain quicker results and match QE with DevOps, an automation framework should be integrated with the build release management process (CI/CD pipeline) in addition to automating test cases. It is necessary to standardize all testing environments, and deployments ought to be carried out automatically. This makes it possible to start the automation framework execution as soon as the build is available. Results should then be automatically communicated with the stakeholders. Before the code is deployed into the production environment, blockers or serious issues discovered during testing should be reported, fixed, and forwarded via the same chain of events. Software updates and deployment procedures (CI/CD pipeline) should also incorporate security testing to find vulnerabilities when the code is modified.
The role of QE in DevOps goes beyond just focusing on testing. The development process must involve QE, including estimations, requirements, and code reviews. QE collaborates closely with the development team and configures technical code analysis, review, and coverage tools. It ensures that the code review is finished at every level and that almost 100% of the code is covered. Finally, to set up monitoring of the production environment, QE collaborates closely with the operations team. This can reveal infrastructure-related problems before they lead to failure. It is possible to gain much information about the end-user experience and guarantee that the systems are always online by setting up desirable metrics like response times, memory, and CPU use.
In a nutshell, QE has changed to fit into the DevOps framework. Throughout the entire product lifecycle, QE must be included and work with the other teams. To achieve the best results, the right QE tools must be chosen for test management, test automation, security testing, performance testing, and application & infrastructure monitoring. The complementary technologies should integrate easily for the CI/CD processes to yield the required, quick outcomes.