The process and purpose of software
testing is always the same for all development methods. What differs is their
placement and execution in the cycle. The weightage given to the different test
types and the time invested in them makes all the difference in the quality of
the software delivered.
DevOps is all about continuous delivery
and continuous integration, which necessitates continuous testing. An ideal
DevOps cycle starts from coding, deploying the binaries in the quality
assurance environment, executing the test cases and deploying the unit process
into production. Hence, it greatly emphasizes on automating builds and using
CI(Continuous Integration) tools. It requires a very high level of coordination
between the different functions of the process chain.
DevOps requires its environment to
resemble the production environment at all times. This is because DevOps
concentrates on the following main implementation processes:
- Continuous Integration
- Continuous Delivery
- Continuous Testing
- Continuous Monitoring
The continuous integration
and delivery process get the right code
to the right environment and enable the next two processes to validate that the
right application has been built which functions as specified.
The developers create the code, which
they forward to the other developers in the team. Along the way, unit tests
would be run on their code. The code by both the teams are then integrated
without changing. Once the code integration is done, unit tests are performed
in the integrated code. Other tests such as White box security tests, code performance tests are also performed. Following this process, the work of all the
teams on the project, are integrated making the service, application or the
system. The point here to be noted is that in this process all the code
integrates are validated at all levels without error and all the tests run
without error.
Continuous Integration and Continuous
Delivery both do not have any meaning without continuous testing. After
validating that the entire application is free of errors, it is delivered to
the QA. The role of Quality Assurance is different in DevOps-
- The QA team is required to align their
efforts in the development cycle.
- They need to ensure that all the test
scripts are automated and have 100% code coverage.
- They need to standardize their
environments and have automated deployment on their QA boxes.
- All their testing tasks are automated
and aligned with the cycle of Continuous Integration
.
The main differentiator of the best
practices in DevOps infrastructure, is its
testing maturity. Many organizations automate their development and delivery processes,
but fail at orchestrating test automations.
Testing architects and testing
teams play a vital role in test design, test automations and development of
test cases in DevOps.
Conclusion
Thus, testing in
DevOps helps to proactively find and fix errors very early in the development
process in turn increasing the team productivity. It identifies and and acts on
core builds and test feedback and delivers a substantially better user experience
of the software application then those delivered by following other software
development methodology.
