6 Must-Haves for Your Ultimate DevOps Testing Success

So, you want to be a DevOps team? You’re ready to create a culture at your company that unites development and testing with operations. You want to see measurable results from projects benefiting both your business and your customers. You’re eager to speed up development cycles to remain competitive in your industry without sacrificing security or software reliability.

DevOps can make that happen. But first, you will likely have to make some changes. Let's explore 6 must-haves for your ultimate DevOps Testing Success.

DevOps can only be as successful as its implementation within your organization. What makes a DevOps team successful is its commitment to key DevOps principles, including communication, collaboration, automation and customer-centricity. And with the right skills and tools to support your DevOps testing practices, it won’t take long for your team to see results.

Where should you start? Here are six must-haves for every DevOps team and how you can implement each essential at your organization.

Strong Communication & Collaboration

Every team has its own goals and works close to 100% of the time to achieve them. Every team also speaks its own professional language and has its own set of responsibilities within the company. And, when these differences aren’t communicated well during the project, problems in development, testing and execution are bound to happen.

Strong communication and collaboration are key to success in DevOps testing. To reach this state, your teams must first establish a foundation of shared, valued goals. Then, define the most efficient methods of communication across teams, from using a shared professional language and definitions of terms to communication platforms. Finally, determine the best ways for your teams to collaborate, from brainstorm sessions and touch-base meetings times to refining game plans when bottlenecks or issues occur.

Teams that communicate and collaborate effectively achieve better results. All teams must believe that they’re on one team as part of the organization, where all sub-teams cooperate to reach the same goals. Putting effort towards these initiatives can break down silos and align internal teams to the benefit of the customer and the company.

Solid Understanding of DevOps Key Concepts & Tools

The DevOps testing landscape is ripe with fruitful new tools and technologies. Yet, having too many platforms and options can make the environment feel like it’s disjointed and riddled with weeds.

There’s not enough time in the day—or in a development cycle—to master them all. Fortunately, knowing one’s way around the major DevOps tools is enough to adapt to new tools and technology changes that your team may encounter later down the road.

This approach isn’t taking a shortcut—in fact, you’ll find that your team gains a deeper understanding of these technologies more quickly. That’s because great DevOps engineers and testers are driven by their curiosity, so it won’t take long for your team to uncover the commonalities between these major DevOps tools:

• Source Control: Git, Bitbucket, SVN, VSTS
• Continuous Integration: Jenkins, Bamboo, TeamCity
• Configuration Management: Puppet, Chef, Ansible
• Deployment Automation: Jenkins, VSTS, Octopus Deploy
• Container Concepts: Docker, Vagrant, LXD
• Orchestration: Kubernetes, Mesos, Swarm
• Cloud: AWS, Azure, GoogleCloud (GCP), Openstack

Stringent Security & Data Protection Protocols

It’s easy to see why DevSecOps (security DevOps) is an industry buzzword. Its focus is to hold all teams accountable for security by implementing decisions and actions around security at the same scale and speed as those for development, testing and operations.

In this day and age, there’s not one company that can’t benefit from stronger security measures – especially if you’re developing software for highly regulated industries such as banking and financial services, healthcare and biotech, legal tech, cybersecurity, energy, transportation and more.

DevOps is designed to develop, test and release software more rapidly. This can lead to high-risk vulnerabilities within your software if your security teams cannot keep up with these faster development cycles or if your organization has not yet perfected internal security processes.

Hence, the importance of DevSecOps. With solid security practices and data protection protocols in place, your DevOps testing team can refine test case execution so that these susceptibilities are caught, documented and fixed prior to market launch.

Continuous Integration & Delivery of Automation

Software developers often work in isolation to get the job done. However, it’s this isolation that can lead to merge conflicts in code integration, from duplicating efforts and diverging code strategies to making bugs hard to detect or fix.

Successful DevOps teams rely on Continuous Integration to keep the master branch clean. Continuous Integration (CI) is the automation process of building and testing of code each time someone on your team commits changes to version control. This is a significant part of the build pipeline because Continuous Integration unites developers to code within the master copy, hence merging the data effectively for DevOps testing and deployment.

Tools such as Jenkins, Bamboo, froglogic and TeamCity to name a few, can support your team’s initiative to make this happen. You can also solidify your team’s understanding by encouraging certification in Continuous Delivery Architecture.

Coding, Scripting & Cloud Fundamentals

Your DevOps team cannot maintain an accelerated development cycle without the assistance of cloud. That’s because the cloud:

• provides a centralized platform for DevOps testing, deployment and code release
• supports DevOps automation by offering security, cost-efficiency and CI/CD tools
• guarantees easy monitoring of resources where the related cost can be adjusted and tracked

Before your organization goes full-on DevOps, confirm that your team has experience working with cloud infrastructure and provide internal training on cloud fundamentals so that your team is on the same page about best practices.

Same goes for familiarizing your team with coding and scripting. Your team should be able to write manual codes and replace manual processes such as IP addresses and DNS codes. While it is not necessary to be experts on all programming languages, your team should be comfortable writing code using Ruby, Python, Java, Javascript, Perl, PHP, Bash and Shell in order to support test automation.

Laser Focus on Customer Centricity

The end goal of every project and every development cycle should be to deliver the most value to the customer. With so much tunnel-vision focus on developing features, executing test cases and deploying on schedule—not to mention combating a sea of bottlenecks and issues—this end goal can get lost and drift out of sight.

DevOps can only be as successful as the tangible results it can deliver to the business. Staying focused on the needs of the customer means:

• establishing key stakeholders—business leaders, developers, testers, project managers—committed to voicing the customer’s needs throughout the project
• synchronizing and optimizing all DevOps testing and development activities around the end goal
• analyzing all activities of the project post-deployment to strategize on ways to enhance customer centricity for future projects and development cycles

DevOps keeps your team ahead in a competitive industry where technology advancements can accelerate customer expectation.  Not sure where to start? Partnering with a QA services provider like QASource can speed up your team’s transition to DevOps. Our team of engineers and testers have years of DevOps experience and can guide your team towards smarter, faster deployments. Learn more - speak to a specialist and get a quote today!

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