DevOps: Its Importance for Software Testing

by Tech Addict Writer, Blogger

With the focus and scrutiny in the IT world, it is now more important than ever to quickly deliver software to the market, albeit without compromising on its quality even one bit. Such exacting demands from the ecosystem meant that the prevalent testing models were not sufficient enough to deal with the requirements posed by the market. And it is this pressing need that finally led to the shift from Waterfall and Agile models to the new age DevOps model. You see, with the Waterfall model, testing was simply an individual phase in the software development lifecycle. Such a siloed strategy took a toll on the project and eventually led to the emergence of the Agile model.

Agile was decidedly better than what the Waterfall model had to offer, but it had its own set of shortfalls as well. The critical issue being that the responsibility for the final deployment fell upon another team, i.e., TechOps. And to tend to the challenges posed by that model, experts finally came up with the DevOps model, which took on the mantle from Agile and offered a world of improvements in every possible context. It closes the gap between development, testing, and release & deployment. To put it merely, DevOps, when it comes to testing, spans the entire duration of the software development lifecycle instead of focusing myopically only on validating features and functionalities.

Now that we know what drove the emergence of DevOps, it is time to take a look at some of the benefits it enables for software testing.

Security: With DevOps, what happens is that the security of data is automatically a part of all stakeholder’s tasks. And not only that, but the strategy also enables static and dynamic analysis to ensure things like run-time behaviors, response time, and more are all tested. It is essential since it helps the team to predict and determine security-related issues in the production environment.
Accelerated timeline: One of the main problems with Agile and Waterfall models was the time it took to complete the process, starting from development to production. In this context, DevOps helps by enabling persistent testing in a well balanced and steady production environment. As a result, the testing team can concentrate its efforts on determining and enhancing other benchmarks before the solution is deployed.
Focus on non-functional needs: The chaos engineering strategy implements an arbitrary action, that may otherwise be deemed destructive, in the production environment as a means to test assess with the product’s resilience. This DevOps approach ensures the system’s reliability as well as gauges the system’s ability to fix issues caused by such chaos.

Owing to the emergence of more and more avant-garde technologies such as artificial intelligence, IoT, and more, software testing has been elevated to one of the top priorities in the development process. And the one thing that can help companies navigate the challenges thus posed is with DevOps. So, the next time you talk to your QA and testing company, you know what you need to talk about with them.