DevOps – It’s all about continuous testing !

I loved reading Steve Wilson’s blog post “Don’t Fear Testing Team. DevOps is Here!” https://devops.com/blogs/dont-fear-testing-team-devops-is-here/  The idea that DevOps  somehow reduces the need for testing  certainly puts fear in the hearts of QA and test teams who may envision the demise of product quality,  reduced test resources and even their very livelihood.  I understand the sentiment of the idea about testing going away, but this is misleading.

Testing is important to DevOps. Prior to code integration to trunk, developers pre-flight test their code to make sure it doesn’t blow up the trunk. During the CI cycle and code commits from multiple developers integration testing is used to verify merges.  During the continuous testing phase where nightly and weekend regression runs are automated for trunk and release branches it is testing that does the job of finding problems before the software release.  During the development process the verdicts trends from testing are a primary measurement of progress. During the release deployment phase more testing verifies the release packages are ready for release.  Rest assured test team, you are needed.  What DevOps really does is bring testing into the mainstream of development processes, and avoids the problems created by having “big-bang” testing left to the end of the cycle, such as release delays, and quality issues.

Testing maturity is a key differentiator of best practices DevOps infrastructures. My experiences with DevOps infrastructures over the years indicate that testing maturity is a key differentiator of overall DevOps infrastructure maturity. Many organizations can automate their integrations, builds and delivery processes but still have trouble with the subtleness of test orchestration and automation.  There is a vital role for testing architects and testing teams to offer their expertise for test design, test automation and test case development with DevOps.   Whether the organization is using a test driven development methodology, behavior based test creation, model-based testing or whatever they use, testing is a vital part of the overall DevOps process — not only to ensure verify code changes work and integrate well — but to ensure the changes do not blow up the product. So clearly testing is still an integral part of product development and delivery.

At my company Spirent we think testing has a bright future in DevOps. You can read more about our views at http://www.spirent.com/solutions/devops