What is QAOps and what is the buzz about it?
Rapid changes and new trends are emerging in this era of software testing and development, where technology advances at lightning speed & every organization wants the best product in the market. To take the lead, an organization must adopt the latest trends in software testing to offer the best software products in the market.
There’s a new trend emerging in software development and testing, and its name is QAOps. A method of testing that assures both speed and quality.
QAOps is a new-age testing practice that is changing the way quality assurance works. With the emergence of big data, cloud and AI, a new testing method that works with complex technologies emerged
Being a new-age practice, it helps to integrate quality assurance into the software delivery pipeline; in other words – QAOps combines Quality Assurance (QA) and software operations (Ops). QAOps, also known as DevTestOps can be defined in terms of two key principles:
- Quality Assurance operations integrate into the CI/CD pipeline.
- QA engineers work closely with developers, IT Ops engineers, and anyone involved in the CI/CD pipeline
QAOps Framework & why does it matter?
Any good business should know how & when to use a QA framework along with the pros and cons. QA framework can be applied at any stage – design, development, production, post-go-live, etc.
QAOps is the process of setting up the testing platform, which involves three major steps Trigger, Execute, and Report.
Achieving QAOps in Testing Process – Basic Practices:
QAOps framework is in the below high-level areas:
- Automated Testing – Test automation maximizes efficiency, speed, and application quality.
- Regression Testing – It reduces the effort when updating and re-releasing a product.
- Parallel Testing – Running multiple tests at once.
- Exploratory Testing – This focuses on discovery and depends on feedback from the individual tester to uncover defects.
- Test scalability – This is non-functional and helps measure an application’s performance or behavior of a system based on the number of users, i.e. how the product behaves under different request loads.
- Integrate Dev and Ops with QA – This involves integrating the QA process in the CI/CD pipeline.
Components Covered
The four core components covered in QAOps are Planning, control, management and insights.
When all these four components are used at the correct time and place, QAOps can drastically decrease the amount of QA time needed.
Clarity between testers and developers is important. Setting up a continuous & integrated framework that focuses on continuous builds, continuous validation, and continuous delivery improves productivity. When this framework integrates with DevOps, we can achieve the transparency of the workflow and product release.
Testing Types
A good product for any organization supports multiple platforms, which is the need of the hour. Most of the customers have numerous clients that work on – Mobile/Web or API.
Best Practices to be followed
- Tool Integrations with CI
- Automation expertise
- Approaches & practices to improve the test case quality.
The Benefits
Quality – Though QAOps is new, it is gradually gaining popularity as DevOps is becoming more used among businesses. Since the main focus of QAOps is quality, this is one of the most important reasons why organizations should start adopting it. Compared to the old traditional methodology, with QAOps, the developed products are more likely to be of high quality, which is one of the key elements & a plus point.
Great teamwork & collaboration among Teams – It boosts teamwork and productivity. Since the teams are fully involved in the process and the delivery pipeline, it results in good co-operation and a better understanding of the requirements.
How to Evolve with QAOps
The organizations need to understand and realize what it offers at large and educate & evolve the testers with the QAOps use tools, use cases to work on, techniques to follow, collaborations, and discipline associated with the application life cycle.
Conclusion
QAOps ensures:
- Quality is not neglected in the SDLC even after being a new trend. In just no time, it allows the automation of processes between software development, IT, and QA to deliver software faster coupled with better quality.
- Implementing QAOps any day gives any organization an upper hand over the competitors in the software development industry since it works on enhancing the process with quality with speed.
- Speed of delivery doesn’t negatively impact the quality of software. Here is where QAOps comes into use.
- Not even a doubt, QAOps is one of the fast-paced rising techniques for testers and a revolution in testing continuously by covering all end-points of Continuous Integration & development.
- Testers work on enhancing their skill level for the testing concepts and the Integration and deployment of continuous builds.
“Investment in quality early on is an example of the right efforts put at the right time”
