Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd. has been recognized as a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Zero Trust Platform Providers, Q3 2023 report.
By now, you're probably familiar with the agile way, and why it's a boon to engineering teams everywhere. Agile is practically the only way to keep pace with today's rapidly moving tech landscape; to deliver products to market in a way that prioritizes both speed and quality. And if you know about agile, you probably know about DevOps — or the practice of bringing that same agility to software development and operations teams.
DevOps involves continuous development, integration, deployment, and monitoring of the product throughout its entire life cycle, which is to say that it completely dissolves the silos and start-stop style of working that the waterfall approach is known for. It requires the entire engineering team — devs, QA, IT, and others — to work in conjunction in pursuit of a common goal: high quality, pushed to customers right on time.
DevOps can shape the way teams work in a powerful way. It requires total collaboration and efficiency, and that can mean a lot of changes and tweaks to the way certain teams currently work.
For example, how does the culture of DevOps change the behaviors and processes of the average QA team? Let's look at how QA Leads, QA Managers, and QA engineers themselves can leverage the DevOps mentality to increase the quality and fast-track the deployment of each release.
Continuous Integration as a Rule
In a high-functioning DevOps team, QA works with Development to push daily tests into the continuous integration (CI) system to speed the delivery time to market. To help expedite this, the QA team ensures that the tests require little (if any) manual intervention, and that test data is generated automatically and dynamically.
If CI is the first pillar that supports QA's role in a DevOps team, automation testing is the second. It helps eliminate the tedious manual work, free up a huge amount of time for everyone involved in the product life cycle, and ensure high build quality upon delivery.
QA also works with Ops teams to develop scripts used for backup, restoration, and deployment, allowing them to push code out when it's functioning properly, and roll it back if there's a serious issue.
Increasing Repeatability and Predictability
Ideally, the DevOps process allows for a new release every day, or even every hour. To achieve this, QA teams should aim to automate everything they can, with a goal of totally eliminating manual testing. This requires building strong UI/API frameworks for automation, so that key tests can basically run themselves.
This way, engineers are able to focus on reviewing the test results and snapping into action if anything's not quite right, instead of spending time manually inputting data and running the tests themselves. With automation, the goal is always consistency in repetition and utmost predictability.
Collaboration is Key
The best automated tests are the result of tight, seamless collaboration between the Dev and QA team. Developers lend a hand with their deep understanding of the code, helping to make automated tests more robust. Test engineers leverage their specific testing aptitudes to ensure that tests are run per business requirements.
In both teams, there is an explicit understanding that together they're contributing to a larger effort: a process where there is no need to trade quality for speedy delivery.
Summing Up
As you've learned, DevOps requires QA teams to play ball with Dev teams. The ability to continuously deliver at high speeds requires deep collaboration, careful test planning, full automation of test suites, and a strong push for repeatability and predictability.
Even if your QA team requires some uncomfortable process changes and shifts in the way they work with Dev, it's certainly worth it. And in the end, you'll have a unified, mission-driven DevOps team and a highly productive, collaborative culture.
Industry News
Red Hat and Oracle announced the expansion of their alliance to offer customers a greater choice in deploying applications on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). As part of the expanded collaboration, Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes for architecting, building, and deploying cloud-native applications, will be supported and certified to run on OCI.
Harness announced the availability of Gitness™, a freely available, fully open source Git platform that brings a new era of collaboration, speed, security, and intelligence to software development.
Oracle announced new application development capabilities to enable developers to rapidly build and deploy applications on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
Sonar announced zero-configuration, automatic analysis for programming languages C and C++ within SonarCloud.
DataStax announced a new JSON API for Astra DB – the database-as-a-service built on the open source Apache Cassandra® – delivering on one of the most highly requested user features, and providing a seamless experience for Javascript developers building AI applications.
Mirantis launched Lens AppIQ, available directly in Lens Desktop and as (Software as a Service) SaaS.
Buildkite announced the company has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Packagecloud, a cloud-based software package management platform, in an all stock deal.
CrowdStrike has agreed to acquire Bionic, a provider of Application Security Posture Management (ASPM).
Perforce Software announces BlazeMeter's Test Data Pro, the latest addition to its continuous testing platform.
CloudBees announced a new cloud native DevSecOps platform that places platform engineers and developer experience front and center.
Akuity announced a new open source tool, Kargo, to implement change promotions across many application life cycle stages using GitOps principles.
Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd. announced that it has been recognized on Newsweek’s inaugural list of the World’s Most Trustworthy Companies 2023.
CloudBees announced significant performance and scalability breakthroughs for Jenkins® with new updates to its CloudBees Continuous Integration (CI) software.