Businesses are increasingly preferring DevOps platform along with automation testing to build high-quality software for their customers and audience across all touchpoints. The two primary testing objectives of DevOps, continuous integration and delivery now draws tremendously from the automation testing. Automation testing perfectly matches the key attributes of the DevOps platform in bringing together the products, people and processes for seamless and smooth delivery of software solution.
But DevOps at the same time boasts of a highly people-centric development practice that believes in collaborating with the human skills with the automation of delivery pipeline. This is why bringing human value in DevOps automation testing remains so important. No software development company adopting to DevOps and agile can undermine the role of human expertise in testing besides carrying out the automation testing.
Here we are going to explain the key DevOps testing principles and tools that perfectly brings together contributions of human and tools.
Automation Testing Increase Productivity in DevOps
As businesses are going through a rapid transformation thanks to the digitisation, an increasing number of businesses are embracing DevOps to get the advantage of automated development and delivery of software. In today’s organisations development and deployment take place simultaneously while maintaining optimum quality through testing remains a priority. This is exactly where automation testing helps by ensuring the quality of software with faster development and turnaround time.
Some of the key ways automation in DevOps empowers businesses with include the following.
- Improve the quality, reliability, reusability of the software components.
- Cost-saving for all upgrading and maintenance tasks.
- Ensuring rapid delivery by enhancing the success rate of standard processes.
Automation Has A Limit Too
While the DevOps approach allows developers to automating a whole array of operational activities, this also has a limit. Basically, automation helps in mitigating the constraints and bottlenecks in the delivery pipeline. But that obviously doesn’t mean that the DevOps works as a process without needing human intervention at all. DevOps testing professionals play a great role in carrying out testing processes for flawless delivery and output. Governance, maintenance and looking after the processes still find the role of human professionals indispensable in DevOps.
Moreover, in spite of the huge benefit of testing automation, automation of all tests may not be effective at all. For instance, usability testing must require human role in evaluating the usability of the software. The DevOps project will need both manual and automation testing to evaluate the qualitative aspects of software before launching an application. Using a mix of manual testing and automation is the time-tested way to the success of DevOps projects.
Automation is More Than Just GUI Functional Testing
Source – https://www.testingxperts.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/B.jpg
It is common for most developer teams to carry out automation testing with GUI functional tests. But since GUI components frequently change and they are slow for implementation, the testers need to undertake different testing methods to detect issues more easily. To do away with the risks of the defective application and to ensure optimum quality, several layers of testing are required. Instead of only sticking to GUI functional testing, the developer teams should have a clear and well-planned automation testing strategy with the respective time required to evaluate each specific area.
Do Away with One-Size-Fits-All Approach
If you see DevOps automation to replace other important roles you are terribly mistaken. The focus of DevOps is to bring together cross-functional development teams to remove the long-standing barriers between the development and operations teams to facilitate collaboration. The DevOps functional approach combining both the skilled members of development and operations teams can only embrace an automation approach based upon the project. A one-size-fits-all approach is not the right approach here.
Continuous Evaluation, Testing, and Improvement
DevOps testing is known to be highly effective because of the deeper monitoring capacity corresponding to multiple layers of the testing process starting from the components to integration to infrastructure and the transactions. In-depth analysis, evaluation, and monitoring became the hallmark of the DevOps approach of development. Thanks to this approach, monitoring, testing, and evaluation are carried out in an organic manner without anyone to be able to distinguish them. Thanks to continuous testing and monitoring a better user experience can always be ensured without much worries for the post-production feedback.
Use Quality Test Automation Tools
DevOps developers can take help from an array of highly sophisticated test automation tools. Well, while there are so many tools to choose from you need to choose ones that meet your team capabilities and resources in hand. Gaining maximum business value by utilising the best automation tools that are perfect for your in-house capability is the strategy you need to embrace. Let us mention below some of the most important automation testing tools.
-
- Selenium: This popular web automation testing tool supports almost all major operating systems including Linux, Windows, and Mac. It allows building test scripts using languages such as Python, Java, Groovy, C#, PHP, Ruby, and Perl. By using this tool along with Robot framework you can extend the automation testing capability across mobile platforms like iOS and Android.
- Testsigma: This AI-based test automation tool is known for a simple script written in natural language. This tool also offers robust reusability through step groups and repository of centralised objects. It comes with all the key features of enterprise-grade test automation tools.
- IBM Rational Functional Tester: This functionally testing tool from IBM is also capable of regression testing, performance testing, and API testing. It can be used across a wide spectrum of applications in combination with a variety of other tools.
- Tricentis Tosca: It is a testing tool used by agile and DevOps projects for continuous testing needs. With a model-based testing approach, this tool helps in easy maintenance of testing scripts. It can be easily integrated into many enterprise software environments with continuous integration workflow.
- UFT: This is another robust cross-platform automation testing tool that allows testing with keywords besides using manual scripts. It offers great support for continuous integration tools and API testing for a number of testing requirements including the web and API.
- TestComplete: TestComplete is another robust automation testing tool that allows developers to carry out automated tests on multiple platforms including Microsoft Windows, Web, Android, and iOS platforms. It is a versatile testing tool that allows recording and scripting tests or manually creating tests.
Conclusion
The growth and popularity of DevOps and agile development practices have already reached to the optimum and there is no going back from these practices. Since automation testing is integral to this evolving development paradigms, every project needs to consider the testing principles, guidelines and tools seriously to ensure best results. Instead of taking automation testing for granted across all testing needs, modern software projects need to go deeper and consider the underlying challenges where human intervention is irreplaceable.
