Introduction:
Test Ops has become a cornerstone in software development to deliver software without breaking the existing functionality and performance. Many organizations are leveraging its benefits to scale their automation testing efforts.
Let’s dive deep to know its importance in the software development ecosystem and how it overcomes the challenges in DevOps.
What Is TestOps?
TestOps is the practice of leveraging automation to centralize and streamline the software development planning, monitoring, and testing. Also, Test Ops is defined as the discipline of managing and scaling test automation to maximize application quality, delivery speed, and efficiency. It helps you scale your testing teams and testing processes.
How does TestOps work?
All Continuous build, continuous validation, and continuous delivery work together. Continuous build and continuous validation are parts of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). And the test data in Test Ops is collected from different sources such as production systems, exposer data, test cases, and test monitors. This test data is required for the system to evaluate the build’s performance.
TestOps framework has the following workflow.
- Test data preparation
- Testing It covers various types, such as Manual Testing, Automation Testing, Accessibility Testing, Integration Testing, Performance Testing, Load Testing, and Security Testing.
- Knowledge of CI/CD to validate the processes and resolve the issue while building deployment
Need of Testops:
Running automated tests won’t be a problem in the case of simple applications and small teams. However, the complexity in terms of development, operations, and testing will grow as the application and team codebase grow. Though DevOps is helping to accelerate the velocity of the release, the time consumed by testing and QA teams (due to checks and gates) has become a bottleneck in the delivery of timely releases.
This is where TestOps plays a significant role. Test Ops creates a seamless testing environment alongside DevOps build and deployment infrastructure, thus assisting other teams, especially, DevOps, in the release process.
To sum up, these are the reasons why organizations need TestOps, the future of software testing.
- for faster release cycles and to increase the speed of testing.
- TestOps practices help stay competitive and productive all the time.
- The TestOps framework is a great help when there is an IT team of a small size.
- Remote access to applications via omnichannel increases the need for security and performance testing. It can be addressed with Test Ops effectively.
- As remote access to applications is increasing, code deployment will be continued.
What are the components of TestOps?
There four basic elements where TestOps can drive efficiencies include Planning, Control, Management, and Insights.
Planning:
All business owners, developers, and the QA team collaborate to make choices in this phase of TestOps. It involves
- Setting up Test goals
- Test design and type of test
- Understanding of code complexity, risks involved, existing test coverage, and various factors that may affect the testing speed.
- Test Prioritization (Based on the above elements)
- When to test, how to test, and who to test
Control:
It represents the authority over testing and how we build tests of high standards. A small team relies on oral agreements and memory whereas a larger team requires processes. Processes become more critical as we scale. Testing experts will
- reuse existing testing components,
- change control processes, including required reviews,
- To resolve conflicts before merging changes,
- help standardize best practices to prevent unauthorized changes.
Management:
It refers to the organization and management of tests, tools, and teams. TestOps management ensures that testing procedures are efficient and scalable. It includes the following.
- organisation of tests and teams
- distribution of the workload
- clarification of responsibilities to all members of the team
- test execution and test status
Insights:
TestOps analysis helps to better understand project quality, release readiness, and team effectiveness. It includes
- Analysis: reviewing all aspects of the testing operation such as stability, performance, failure diagnostics, etc.
- Reporting: to make improvements in the testing process based on the test reports or results.
- Learning: to eliminate recurring problems
- Transformation.
Features of TestOps:
These are the features available with TestOps to help you create, test, and release software applications and track your projects.
- Integration with DevOps
TestOps ensures the product development pipeline is equipped with all the required testing tools and frameworks. And by taking ownership of DevOps-related test operations (dev-test ops), TestOps provides QA engineers and developers complete control and insight over the development pipeline, allowing them to modify it as per the requirements.
- Improved test planning
For a seamless workflow, the team must have a clear understanding of what should be tested and when. And automation would not be effective if the entire codebase needed to be tested every time the code changed. So, TestOps offers a centralized platform to make it easier for developers and testers to find what tests to execute and when.
- Accelerated test quality and accuracy
TestOps assures that the code is tested and flaws fixed without human intervention. Also, it makes sure the QA team has reviewed all the test APIs and the product is running without hassles.
- Reduced execution time
TestOps lets developers leverage test automation benefits by removing the complexity of manual testing and allowing them to make better use of test environments.
- It helps maintain code consistency
The consistency of the code should be maintained post-build. TestOps allows teams to test changes with both upstream and downstream customers by providing modules. Thus, it maintains consistency and identifies changes without manual intervention.
- All bugs will be fixed at the primitive level
With the help of dev-test ops, all bugs and errors will be identified and fixed at the primitive level.
- Real-time dashboards
Testing teams can better understand the state of software releases and the work that needs to be done to build, approve, or execute more tests with real-time results.
What are the Best Practices for TestOps?
TestOps can’t be implemented in a hurry, and procrastination, on the other hand, will lead to a significant loss of revenue. So, get started right away and adopt some of the best practices mentioned below to improve your chances of success as a TestOps engineer.
- Understanding how to integrate different tools with CI is critical for testing.
- There is a need to practice test automation more.
- Practice multi-layer testing wherever possible.
- Include performance testing in the delivery cycle.
- Gain new tools skillset for reliability testing, data analytics, monitoring, CX testing, etc.
- Don’t spend your crucial time on unused and additional executions.
- Adhere to a stringent containerization policy.
- Keep track of your execution matrix to retrieve the most recent execution result sets.
What are the skills required to work with TestOps?
TestOps framework allows developers to leverage the benefits of test automation. So, working with TestOps requires more than just standard testing abilities. These are the required skillset required to become a TestOps engineer.
- Skills related to the understanding of operations and monitoring principles, data analytics, CX testing, and reliability testing are required.
- Sound knowledge on JAVASCRIPT and PYTHON are required to create test scripts.
- Knowledge of operating systems and scripting across all operating systems is required.
- Good automation skills are required to test fast.
- Knowledge of operational activities such as networks, configuration details, failures, alarms, MTBF, MMTR, etc.
- To get the most out of the tests, you’ll need to know how to interact with various integration technologies like Jenkins, Bamboo, etc.
- Need to gain a thorough understanding and research of data sharing mechanisms such as REST, WebSockets, etc.
- Non-functional testing skills and tool expertise are required.
TestOps Vs DevOps:
DevOps and TestOps might look similar, but TestOps compliments DevOps. The below table depicts the major comparison between TestOps and DevOps. Have a look at it.
| TESTOPS | DEVOPS |
| TESTOPS=Test+Operations | DEVOPS=Development+Operations |
| TestOps is a process that blends development, operations, and testing artifacts. It applies the process of software analytics to enhance the Verification &Validation strategy. To maximize efficiency to improve quality to speed up testing | DevOps is a set of practices that combines IT operations and software development.to shorten the development life cycle of systems to provide continuous delivery to provide high software quality. |
| TestOps provides the automated testing technique. | DevOps ensures that the tests are run in the right environment. |
| When working with a software development pipeline (Workflow), the TestOps framework makes sure that all the operations and processes are executed thus helping in faster software delivery without breaking its quality. | When working with a software development pipeline (Workflow), DevOps is responsible for ensuring that all development life cycle operations are in place to achieve accelerated software delivery. |
Conclusion:
TestOps has gained traction as a fundamental approach for a sustainable software delivery ecosystem, and it has a long way to go in the future of software testing.
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