Introduction:
In this new age of software testing, companies are competing to offer the best software tools in the market. Luckily, Agile and DevOps processes have made application release swift and easy for such organizations. QA automation is becoming a necessity to ensure high-quality products and delivery.
Quality assurance practices are now a necessity for organizations that want to stay ahead of the competition. Keeping the new-found relevance of QA in mind, software testing experts are looking forward to seeing an ever-increasing number of organizations moving towards a DevOps approach. In a DevOps-driven environment, QA is a shared responsibility between Development and QA team. This mentality motivates all teams to collaborate throughout the development cycle and find more approaches to automate the testing process.
What is QAOps:
There is no specific definition of QAOps to date. However, the idea behind this amalgamation depends on two basic ideas:
- QAOps incorporates continuous testing in DevOps along with a CI/CD pipeline
- QAOps improves the collaboration between QA engineers and developers as well as operations teams.
The Growing Use of QAOps:
Previously, QA was solely focused on testing. That is no longer the case as QA teams are now exploring software quality throughout every development aspect. Many QA groups are applying QAOps as the demand for QA engineers increases. To ensure continuous delivery and integration, QA experts, Dev teams, and IT teams need to work together using a DevOps-based approach. They guarantee the entrance of the software changes in the production phase inside the CI/CD pipeline without quality issues.
Additionally, as per GlobeNewswire – the automation testing market will be worth USD 29,525.87 million by the end of the year 2025. The reason for this anticipated growth is the significance of stimulated intelligence and machine learning (ML) in the testing process.
These two processes help reduce the testing lifecycle and improve the time-to-market ratio of products. Furthermore, QA services such as automation testing have changed the software market completely by allowing quick and efficient testing processes, more immediate customer feedback, improved quality, and rapid delivery. These benefits are fundamental for achieving success in today’s highly competitive business environment.
How can we use QAOps in Testing Process?
QAOps characterizes and streamlines the QA process, integrates QA processes into DevOps, and pulls QA teams out of silos and into the cross-functional product team. It advances cooperation between each designing practice in the SLDC. Moreover, it helps mitigate the communication issues between QA teams in the more traditional software development models.
Automation Testing:
We previously mentioned automation testing and its benefits when discussing the growing use of QAOps. Before we further dive into automation testing and QAOps, let’s define this particular type of testing first:
Automation testing is a software testing technique that compares actual results with expected outcomes. It permits QA analysts to quantify test results and educate subsequent development stages based on the data these tests produce.
Automation testing is necessary for the QAOps environment as it stimulates the quality of the feedback loop. However, before QA experts can build an automation framework, they need to study the product in detail and fully understand its goals, specifications, and functionalities. Once the QA experts have reviewed the product details, they can pick the appropriate tests that need to be automated based on the product stage. Automated tests are then customized into the product’s objectives, saving time and making testing data more relevant.
Parallel Testing:
Since these test cases are automated, they drastically reduce the total testing time of the product/service. This feature makes it the ideal fit for continuous integration, continuous delivery, and QAOps. Furthermore, parallel testing allows accelerated testing inside the delivery pipeline. This is an essential aspect as it is crucial to use automated tests with applications in the cloud, considering large amount of data and load processing needs of cloud architecture.
The QA team can launch CI/CD pipelines with automated smoke tests in multiple parallel streams. It helps by instantly identifying “flaky” tests-tests that show both a passing and a faltering outcome with a similar code. By identifying flaky tests early in the SDLC process, the QA team can eliminate discrepancies in the application.
Conclusion:
QAOps is a beneficial set of practices that automate software development, IT, and QA to enable quick and efficient software delivery. The evolution of QAOps brings attention to the fact that quality is often neglected in software development which is a growing concern. When QA analysts and testing teams work together, they can improve quality and ensure smoother project delivery.
I hope this blog has helped you understand the importance of QAOps in this software-centric world of today. Please reach out to me using the comment box below if you have any questions! You can also get in touch with our QA experts by clicking here.
