Quality assurance and software testing have evolved significantly in the past two years and such concepts as quality engineering and shift-left are becoming more commonplace. To fully understand these winds of change, due in large part to the pandemic, mabl conducted its third annual Testing in DevOps Report. The idea was to ascertain how DevOps adoption continues to impact CI/CD adoption, development speed, and quality practices in the past year. Over 600 quality assurance and software development professionals found that software professionals are very interested in seeing DevOps mature and while there is significant progress, the study also found, not surprisingly, there were still some challenges in the road ahead.
THERE IS STILL WORK TO FULLY ADOPT DEVOPS
Overall, the mabl study found that only 11% of teams have fully adopted DevOps practices. And, another 76% of teams are starting or on the journey. What’s holding back that adoption? Over half of teams cited slow process and ability to change, and budget as the primary reasons for the hold-up.
As software teams continue making progress against DevOps adoption, there are plenty of opportunities for quality teams to get involved. The study found that of the fully DevOps teams, only 50% indicated they have a culture of quality where testing is performed early and often in the development lifecycle. Testers should search for opportunities to integrate quality activities into sprints and get more team members involved.
TEST COVERAGE EQUALS A BETTER CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
In the past, DevOps success has typically been evaluated based on how quickly new code can be shipped into production, Since the pandemic, this attitude had to change as DevOps and QA teams are forced to take a more customer-centric view.
Today, the customer experience is an ever more critical factor in business success, as life has become primarily a digital-first scenario. How can QA contribute to creating a better customer experience? The report stipulated that 80% of teams with high test coverage reported high customer happiness, with only 3% reporting low customer happiness. Compare this to teams that said they had low test coverage, with a nearly 50/50 split between high and low happiness customers. By emphasizing quality engineering metrics like test coverage, QE leaders will be better prepared to showcase the business value of testing and tackle the cultural shifts that continue to inhibit DevOps maturity.
BUILD A CULTURE OF QUALITY
One of the main tenets of DevOps is to ensure the software development process is a team sport – ridding the concept of silos that can stymie both inclusion and innovation. The mabl study found that one-in-three quality practitioners report that testing involves multiple team members.
Quality teams should look at metrics such as bugs in production and MTTR to assess how the broader development team is collaborating on quality. For a baseline, fully DevOps teams were able to fix bugs within 8 hours, compared to peers on the adoption journey where it may take more than two days to address.
In fact, research has shown that an equitable work situation actually results in lower stress for the entire development organization, often resulting in DevOps teams’ ability to catch bugs early in the development process.
CONTINUOUS TESTING BECOMES A REQUIREMENT
Continuous testing (CT) has taken off with the adoption of Agile and DevOps practices. CT encourages software development teams to break away from the idea that testing is a phase of development right before production. Rather, testing activities are integrated throughout the software development lifecycle.
According to the report, 33% of teams are actively transitioning to CI, while 46% of teams have fully adopted CI, and 36% of teams have fully adopted CD. As pipelines become more automated, QE teams won’t be able to keep up with velocity. To further integrate testing into development, QE teams are testing processes with select developers to coach them on proper testing practices in the coding or pull request phases of development. As confidence in these processes grows, teams are automating tests at that phase to open up the testing bottleneck.
It’s an exciting time to work in quality. With processes and trends constantly changing, there are opportunities to integrate testing further into development, contribute to velocity, and optimize customer experiences. Want to see how DevOps is impacting testers in 2022?
Take the Annual Testing in DevOps Survey now.
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