mabl

This is the second Benchmark Report on the State of Testing in DevOps created by mabl.

Every year they send out a survey to gain insight into how leading DevOps practices are benefiting the business and the developer experience (DX). They analyse the results through the lens of testing to understand how QA processes are affected by DevOps transformations and look for key ways that teams can improve upon, ensuring product quality while shipping at speed.

The data for this report comes from the results of a public survey from September 2019 to March 2020 and shared with the software testing and development community via the mabl socials, at conferences, and on technical news and article platforms.

This survey was opened up to all roles that affect software quality, and received about 1030 responses from testers, developers, operations and site reliability engineers, and managers, globally.

In last year’s survey, mabl sought to understand how much testing is being done manually versus automated in the CI/ CD pipeline and how
various QA processes affect stress levels and product quality.

This year, the focus is on testing processes as well as team structure and culture affects the customer experience.

Background
DevOps emerged in order to help software teams bring value to customers faster; QA no doubt has a huge role in the customer experience. But as DevOps delivery practices are being adopted across the industry, more often than not, they’re built without quality assurance as a core capability.

Teams have no choice but to build a testing strategy as they go, rather than designing the culture, processes, and tools upfront. Not having a solid QA foundation is like not seeing the forest for the trees. Leaving QA testing as an afterthought in an DevOps or CI/CD environment results in measurable inefficiencies across the entire development team, and oftentimes negatively impacts the user experience.

The first step to solving any problem? Understanding it. As more organizations make the shift to DevOps and adopt rapid release processes, testing and QA roles are given incredibly broad definitions. Depending on the organization, testers can be part of a development team or be siloed off on their own team. They can be responsible for getting testing into the entire software delivery pipeline, or only be esponsible for manual testing after a build is code complete.

To understand the inefficiencies of QA in DevOps, mabl have mapped out the current landscape of testing in DevOps to unveil what development and testing processes result in world class software, such as:

• CI/CD and cloud adoption
• Integrating QA into development
• Automation and manual processes
• Team structures that work for the employees and for your customers

This Benchmark Report: The State of Testing in DevOps survey was structured to first identify the respondents, then get to know the basics of their delivery practices, and finally understand the effectiveness of their practices.

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