Testing can be one of the more time-consuming aspects of the DevOps process. It can be exhaustive, frustrating, requires a lot of hands-on labor hours and people seldom enjoy it. But testing is vital, and no developer should simply skip it.

Recently, a strong trend has emerged wherein DevOps experts encouraged developers to automate their testing procedures. Test automation can bring your DevOps projects to the next level, save time and maximize pipeline capacity for continuous testing.

Test Automation: Definition and Benefits

Test automation minimizes the amount of human labor required in testing. In test automation, tools and frameworks write testing “scripts” that work to ensure the high quality of your application.

DevOps can use test automation in a variety of different ways–it can even take advantage of test cases and detect bugs in your code. This automatic testing procedure speeds up the process, getting your product to the market much more rapidly. The automatic quality checks can also practically eliminate the risk of human error in the process of continuous testing.

Test automation can also ease the burden of the repetitive nature of some DevOps testing, simplifying and speeding up the process significantly. Finally, automation promotes a high degree of reliability throughout your testing process. Test automation can also optimize your process.

Test Automation in the Context of DevOps

DevOps is all about continuous development—the product is created, deployed, tested, and sent out to be consumed by the end users.

Since it came on the scene, quality assurance (QA) has gained importance. The traditional approach to QA (wait until the product deployed to go through regression and functional testing) was much improved with the advent of DevOps. DevOps integrates the QA team into the whole of the development process, merging all players into a unified team. This integration requires a great deal of coordination across the different stakeholders.

This also allows for a high degree of agility and speed in the process, speed which the DevOps methodology then magnifies through a high amount of automation in continuous testing (which can then be configured to run automatically).

Deciding on the Best Tools for You

To build up an effective test automation process, you must find the right software workflow tools for you and your DevOps team. These tools should support and manage your test assets from a central location, passing your product through the testing process much more quickly and maximizing efficiency. That said, as helpful as having an automated testing process can be to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of your software, using tools that don’t fit with your team and goals will present potentially significant problems for your organization. There is a staggering array of test automation tools available on the market, and they all have their strengths and drawbacks. No single tool will satisfy every need related to automated testing, so your goal needs to be to find the ones that will work the best with your unique needs and desires.

What to Keep in Mind When Choosing a New Tool

Cost (for both licensing and support): Budget is an eternal tyrant, and your team needs to go into this procurement work with a solid understanding of your financial limits. If you have stringent limits there, there are some types of open source software like Selenium that could be useful. These tend to require a substantial degree of technical skill, so they may not be as helpful for you—if that’s a weakness of your team.

Type: There are several different types of DevOps testing tools. Language is one of the more important factors when deciding on one–make sure the tool operates in either the same language as your application or at least one in which your team can efficiently operate. The intended platform for the tool is also notable, as is the intended audience (i.e. whether the product aims more towards developers or testers).

DevOps integration support: It’s always important to double-check that your tool supports both DevOps tool integration and continuous integration. If you don’t effectively coordinate your tools, it will undoubtedly slow down your process.

Training: Depending on the level of expertise within your DevOps team, you’ll need to ensure that there is an appropriate degree of training on how to use the team—for the people who will be using it.

Quality test reports: Test reports with both depth and breadth are crucial to success in continuous testing. These help notice defects and their root causes, then allow you to test the effectiveness of your analysis.

Excellent customer support: You will want to use a tool that will serve your needs well. That means a tool that understands your specific situation and can help you work through complications.

The Necessity of Automation Skills

All of this aside, you cannot just rely on the strength of your test automation tools to get you through the testing process. If you decide to implement test automation without having people on your team with the skills to manage it, you may end up in a challenging position riddled with inefficiency.

Here’s what you need from a test automation software engineer: They must have a broad base of knowledge that encompasses test automation tools. Beyond that, they need to understand how to dive deep into software testing functionality and the technical complexities that undergird the project. They should also know how to write scripts alongside development, collaborating with both operations and development teams. That collaboration between test automation, development and operations will have a deeply important role in writing test scripts and maximizing the coverage of your tests.

A test automation software engineer’s skills offer invaluable stability. Indeed, tools are often built on a foundation of skills. If you have a resourceful and capable software engineer on hand, you’ll be much more prepared for the fluctuations of the market than if you’re relying on a single tool. If you decide to focus on only one tool, your team risks limiting itself and potentially falling behind the times and needs of your customers.

The Dangers of Automation

Automation is one of the foundations of DevOps’ success. But even so, you must strike a delicate balance. If you automate too much, you may end up hurting your product.

When you start connecting too many different tools to your project, you begin to risk unwanted outcomes that practically cancel out the investment you made in DevOps in the first place. If you try to automatically test things that automation can’t effectively measure (general user experience, for example), you’ll end up with worthless data. Your various automation tools can start to create more work than they’re resolving if you need to spend a great deal of effort in managing them.

That said, if you under-automate, you’ll be losing out on workflow efficiencies that your competitors are using, making your team less competitive. Thus, it’s necessary to try and balance the two. The first step to striking this balance is having a thorough understanding of your requirements vis-a-vis testing, development and deployment. If you have that under your belt, you can find the automation tools that work best for your goals. Once you have the right combination of automation tools, you’re golden.

Also, test automation doesn’t negate the need for manual testing—and it isn’t designed to. Of course, certain kinds of manual testing can be eliminated by automation (especially the repetitive kinds).

But you still need manual testers behind the wheel examining your product more thoughtfully and at a deeper level than an automated program. That deep-level variety of manual testing can often discover issues that automatic testing failed to see. It can also provide a more thorough level of insight into the user experience that automatic testing will seldom be able to provide.

Benefits of Test Automation

We’ve covered a lot of deep ideas in this piece. But at the end of the day, test automation is beneficial for a few simple reasons: it reduces human error, simplifies your tests, allows you to deliver products much more quickly and leads to a much more reliable quality assurance structure.

That said, test automation won’t be a panacea for all your team’s ills. It will work, but only if you’ve chosen the right tools and you have people on your team with the skills to use them effectively. Once again, don’t rely on continuous automated testing as the be-all and end-all of your quality assurance practice. Several QA questions show that a human presence is much better at resolving certain types of problems and over-automating can cause significant inefficiencies.

Test automation can be a wildly useful tool if you use it well. These tips will help you take your organization to the next level of efficiency and excellence.