DEVOPSdigest

DEVOPSdigest asked experts from across the industry for their recommendation on a key technology required for DevOps. Part 4 of the list covers QA and testing.

Start with 30 Must-Have Tools to Support DevOps - Part 1

Start with 30 Must-Have Tools to Support DevOps - Part 2

Start with 30 Must-Have Tools to Support DevOps - Part 3

21. QA AUTOMATION

There are many tools to ensure DevOps success. But probably the most forgotten is QA automation that is wicked fast. Fast creation, parallel runs, unit, functional, performance, security, compatibility etc. DevOps should not be a call to lower quality.
Kevin Surace
CEO, Appvance(link is external)

22. LOAD TESTING

Load Test Tools are instrumental. sLoadTest by itself deserves a place as the tool to identify the gap between Dev and Ops when it comes to scalability and stability during load. The tool / SaaS service need to both deliver easy-to-run script as well as being able to scale to massive load. It is worth it to point out that the deployment aspect of DevOps typically includes concepts like continuous integration and deployment. The missing part is often an API driven loadtest validation of performance for every deployment, not just for the big releases.
Sven Hammar
Founder and CEO, Apica(link is external)

23. PERFORMANCE TESTING

A delivery pipeline-friendly performance testing tool is absolutely critical to ensure DevOps success. This confirms that each check-in, integration build, staging deployment and production deployment does not introduce performance issues into the application or site, and that if performance issues do arise, the team is able to get feedback quickly, in under 24 hours, so they can fix the performance issues with the fresh knowledge of the changes that were made. Performance testing as part of the delivery pipeline simultaneously reduces time to test while increasing test coverage. The end result is greater confidence that customer experience will not be impacted by performance issues as new releases are deployed.
Dave Karow
Director of Product Marketing, BlazeMeter(link is external)

24. SERVICE VIRTUALIZATION AND VIRTUAL TEST NETWORK

An increasing number of reviews of Service Virtualization software state that service virtualization is a must-have tool to ensure DevOps success. As one reviewer writes "...our service virtualization software enables us to run more tests and find more defects before going into production.
Russell Rothstein
Founder and CEO, IT Central Station(link is external)

Read Russell Rothstein's latest blog on DEVOPSdigest: DevOps RoundUp from Real Users of CA, HPE and IBM

The adoption of DevOps has shortened and simplified the application development lifecycle. But with an increased focus on speed to market comes an even greater risk that the application will fall short against its objectives. This risk is further accentuated when the application relies - as most do these days - on distributed networks. To mitigate this, DevOps teams need a means of verifying, at every stage of the development process, how the application performs in the real world network environment. This capability is provided by using a Virtual Test Network (Network Emulator) which recreates, on demand, a wide range of adverse network conditions, often encountered in real world networks, in which to test application behaviors.
Frank Puranik
Senior Technical Specialist, iTrinegy(link is external)

Read Frank Puranik's latest blog on DEVOPSdigest: Making Virtual Test Networks Available to the Whole DevOps Team

25. LOG ANALYTICS

One of the most important tools to enable DevOps is log search and analysis across domains for faster root cause analysis. This ensures application problems are detected and diagnosed quickly thereby enabling faster time to market
Payal Chakravarty
Sr. Product Manager - APM, IBM(link is external)

26. ON-DEMAND APP ENVIRONMENT

On-demand fully provisioned application environments are essential to eliminating bottlenecks and reducing contention between development and test teams.
Kelly Looney
Regional Consulting Manager, DevOps Strategy, Skytap(link is external)

Read the last installment of the list, 30 Must-Have Tools to Support DevOps - Part 5, covering collaboration, communication and more.