Test automation plays a crucial part in the DevOps lifecycle as it not only helps in providing high-quality and rapid delivery, but also helps in achieving continuous testing. Risks and costs are lowered and the productivity is also increased through the strategic implementation of automation testing in the DevOps lifecycle. Selecting the right test automation testing tool also plays a crucial role for enhancing the efficiency of the DevOps environment. A DevOps test automation tool must prove to be usable for management, operations personnel, developers and testers. In this article, you will get a detailed overview of using the platform of automated testing in the DevOps lifecycle.
The strategic need to perform automation testing in DevOps Lifecycle:
DevOps is aligned with CI/CD and agile practices. All these three practices have one thing in common and that is to scale up speed and flexibility and thus ensure that a better workflow is allowed through the release pipeline with faster feedback loops and fewer bottlenecks.
The objective of these approaches is to deliver high-quality updates and product releases and that too at a higher speed, when compared to other traditional models. There can be a strategic need to automate testing in DevOps and derive optimal outcomes.
If the same process is done manually then there is a gradual slowdown of the many steps that are taken in the release pipeline. Upon that, there is a likelihood of more errors to occur. When automation is introduced, it brings in accuracy and speed, thereby delivering quality at speed. This can mean that the platform of automation testing justifies the release pipeline.
Implementing automation testing in the DevOps lifecycle:
The release pipeline needs to be mapped in order to conduct DevOps automation testing. For this purpose, following are the four steps that need to be taken into consideration:
1. The stages of the release needs to be identified
2. The requirements that are necessary in a build’s journey to production along with the gates needs to be identified
3. The feedback mechanism should be identified as it helps in detecting errors quickly and solving it at the earliest
4. The services, operational procedures and actions involved with a release cycle needs to be listed.
After the above mentioned four steps are effectively taken into consideration, then after automation flows need to be built. There are specific DevOps automation testing tools that can be used for this purpose.
Following are the best practices that enhance the productivity of DevOps automation testing:
1. Gradually build the automation flows: Initiate with those flows that are easy to automate and that are both repetitive and predictable in nature. Most of the testing time is taken by repetitive flows.
2. One thing at a time needs to be tested: When the complexity of a single test flow is limited, detection of what goes wrong when a test case fails can be done easily. For beginners, this is considered to be a best practice. Instead of multiple tests being bundled up in one test case, it is better to develop reusable components with the test automation tool.
3. Automated test cases that are self-contained and independent need to be built: The structure of flows needs to be reused across test cases, but, it is considered to be a good move to keep tests separate. In this manner, scheduling of all can be done at once and thus can be executed anytime.
4. Collective ownership of test automation should be considered: The team’s collective knowledge is directly related to automation success. A test automation platform needs to be adopted so that all testers can work with in a streamlined manner.
Conclusion: If you are looking forward to implementing DevOps testing for your specific project, then do get connected with a well-established software testing services company that will provide you with a strategic testing roadmap that is in line with your project specific requirements.
