Software testers who are already acquainted with the Agile methodology in software testing, will already be somewhat familiar with DevOps. Despite some subtle differences between DevOps and Agile testing, the former can be said to be an extension of the Agile methodology. DevOps pays more attention to the integration, collaboration and communication among the different processes of software development, including operations, development and QA.

With every passing year, DevOps has been gaining a lot of importance in the domain of software development and thereby impacting QA software testing quite significantly. According to the DevOps methodology, software testing needs to be conducted more frequently and it lays more stress to automated testing. Therefore, a good strategy for DevOps testing must be devised, because, software testers are expected to adapt perfectly to the DevOps environment.

Some useful strategies for DevOps testing

• Being a lot more responsible than a traditional tester

According to traditional practice, software testing services were required to test a product to validate its functionality just ahead of the product’s launch in the market. The process involved receiving the code, testing it to examine whether its functions as desired and finally handing it over to the developers. DevOps, however, involves continuous integration and continuous delivery, thus, changing that entire approach. In this approach, quality engineers need to ensure perfect performance of the product throughout every phase of the development lifecycle.

In the traditional testing methods, like a waterfall or agile scenario, testers have very little underlying information about the production phase.  After the code gets into production, the error rates are checked, and customer feedback is taken into account and testers are then involved to resolve the issues. The DevOps environment, however, is quite fast-paced and does not follow this long feedback approach.

DevOps testing involves quite a shorter feedback cycle and to facilitate that, testers are often involved in the production phase. Muck before the product reaches users and testers are involved in solving issues reported by them, it would be a better strategy to involve testers into production procedure directly, so that they can look for errors and address them immediately. Thus, in this way, users don’t have to have an encounter with errors, while the feedback cycle and the error rates are all reduced at the same time.

• Knowledge about basic coding skills and soft skills

In DevOps, software testers play an essential role in the software development lifecycle. Therefore, possessing some basic coding skills can be really beneficial for them. The DevOps does not only urge QA professionals to ensure the quality of the end-product but also the quality of the process involved in bringing that to the market.

Thus, software testing professionals in the DevOps environment must be able to ascertain whether automated tests are running properly, check the build logs, and understand the software functionality at quite a deeper level than before. Thus, urging your testers to invest in some basic coding skills can be a great strategy to enhance the QA methods and finally get a better-quality end product. 

Apart from coding skills, DevOps necessitates testers to have sound soft skills too, so that they can effectively communicate and collaborate with the software developers and be an active part of the software development lifecycle. Such skills would be required in DevOps because, testers would be involved in more than one phase of siloed testing. Effective communication among teams and breaking down of silos among testers and developers needs proper collaboration. Only if you can successfully send across the message you wish to convey, will you achieve efficiency.

• Embracing the Shift-left approach

The DevOps world is driven by continuous delivery. Letting a problem or glitch linger only results in the growth of the release bottleneck. This generally happens when, instead of automating tests, too many of them are done manually at the end of a development cycle.

Thus, this issue has to be addressed with a workable strategy, where you need to incorporate frameworks, which would make it mandatory to conduct test automation before the product goes into the production phase. 

Apart from the above-mentioned strategies, other good practices include optimizing your test strategy effectively, embracing a more strategic level of reporting test results and so on. DevOps testing has been gaining rapid popularity due to its approach of continuous testing and continuous delivery. Thus, applying the right strategies to DevOps could result in saving time, reducing errors and also achieving better success in terms of getting a better quality end-product.