Alignment with DevOps principles
Many aspects of the DevOps, or Development and Operations, philosophy are true for TestOps too. The central one is collaboration between development, testing, and operations teams, and ensuring proper communication between these specialists is essential for the effectiveness of TestOps. Shared goals and responsibilities further promote open communication between different teams.
At the same time, there also should be a seamless flow of code between these teams, and to ensure it, integrating testing into the continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline is necessary.
Furthermore, similarly to DevOps, TestOps is encouraged to engage in continuous learning and improvement, which includes regular reviews and assessment of testing routines and tools and sharing experience and knowledge with teammates and experts from other specializations.
Achieving a maximum level of test automation
While many types of testing, including ad-hoc testing and UX/UI testing, are still mainly performed manually, numerous other tests can be effectively automated, including functional testing and performance testing. TestOps requires automation to ensure faster feedback, early issue detection, and faster releases of high-quality software.
TestOps has a large choice of test automation tools. Comprehensive no-code solutions with support for automated regression performance testing and report generation, like Executive Automats, can be a good option to considerably reduce the reliance on manual work.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
Similarly to DevOps, TestOps should apply the principles of Infrastructure as Code to work with testing environments. This approach includes the following practices:
- Defining infrastructure requirements, for instance, networks, servers, and databases, with a declarative language;
- Creating new infrastructure components as modular and reusable code snippets whenever required;
- Automating the provisioning of test environments;
- Automating adjusting resources on demand for enhanced scalability;
- Focusing on the adaptability of the infrastructure code by using parametrization.
Versioning and continuous monitoring of test environments
To ensure only desirable changes are implemented in test environments, it is advised to use version control systems like Git, which will allow the team to review and assess potential modifications and roll back to previous states if needed. To employ this approach, TestOps should treat their infrastructure as software code, as mentioned above.
Moreover, it is highly recommended that TestOps teams implement continuous monitoring of test environments, which is a proactive approach allowing the identification of issues early enough. Some of the necessary aspects requiring monitoring are application performance, consumption, and availability of system resources, as well as test execution status.
Proactive testing approach
A proactive approach to testing software requires the integration of testing processes into the early stages of development. Among the types of testing embedded into the TestOps framework early on should be security testing, which will help identify vulnerabilities as early as possible. Furthermore, the agile methodology is also highly recommended for test management as it helps ensure adaptability to changing testing requirements.
Prioritizing quality and cost over speed
TestOps might be under pressure to speed up the testing process to ensure faster releases; however, it should not come at the price of compromised quality and reliability of testing processes and environments.
TestOps should aim to find the right balance between quality and speed at which it is delivered. Otherwise, the team risks overlooking errors and compromising test results, which will eventually lead to a decline in software quality.
Effective global test data management
Many TestOps teams work on large projects where they may be just one of the numerous distributed teams that need to gain access to test data. To improve accessibility, implementation of centralized data repositories may be a sensible approach. At the same time, it is critical to anonymize and mask confidential data, which may be required by data privacy regulations in your industry.
Avoiding common mistakes
TestOps teams are susceptible to making some common mistakes that can compromise the testing effort. These include:
- Inadequate planning for testing environment, configurations, and resource provisioning;
- Insufficient automation of testing processes and infrastructure maintenance;
- Ignoring Infrastructure as Code (IaC) best practices;
- Lack of collaboration between testing, operations, and development teams;
- Ignoring security considerations;
- Insufficient monitoring of test environments and processes;
- Poorly designed test reporting practices;
- Not addressing environment scalability;
- Incomprehensible documentation;
- Neglecting the importance of User Experience (UX) testing in the early stages of development;
- Insufficient focus on continuous improvement.
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Conclusion
An effective TestOps framework involves four fundamental components: proper planning, robust management, effective control, and thorough analysis. To adopt this approach and create an effective TestOps framework, teams should pay particular attention to enhancing collaborative culture, focusing on continuous monitoring and improvement, as well as the adoption of robust tools for automation.
