Why Browser and API Testing is Shifting Left
For developers working with cloud-native technologies, software testing and quality assurance is a key part of product development. For most teams, testing has “shifted left,” so the quality of the code can be assessed as it moves through the CI/CD pipeline. This approach to quality assurance reflects the rise of DevOps and other modern development […]
Maintaining Progressive Delivery Quality With Feature Flags
How does Netflix know exactly what you want to watch? How do social networks ensure major software updates are smoothly deployed across millions of users? The answer, in part, lies in progressive delivery. Progressive delivery, the incremental introduction of new features, has become key to rolling out new features. By testing unproven features on a […]
Why Is QA so Important in Executing a DevOps Implementation Strategy?
In a rapidly growing global digital landscape, enterprises are facing many challenges. These include changing customer behavior and the need to be in line with the latest technology trends. To address these challenges and to stay up the competition curve, enterprises are adopting a slew of strategies. These comprise expanding the capacity of processes, quick […]
Agile QA at Scale: Software Testing Strategies for Enterprise Teams
Change is hard; it’s a universal truth not many people would disagree with. When you’re forcing (or strongly encouraging) change in a group of people, it’s especially hard. Even if that group is small, there’s bound to be miscommunication, disagreement and other friction points that make the change hard to implement. Now, multiply those difficulties […]
5 Tips to Eliminate Knowledge Gaps in Dev and QA
To create and release high-quality software, the software development lifecycle (SDLC) was established using different roles and processes designed to work seamlessly together. This approach is of critical importance because it spans the initial planning phase, all the way through production release and monitoring. Roles vary within projects but typically include designers, business analysts (BA), […]
The Era of Intelligent Testing
The state of the art in software testing has not kept pace with advances in software development over the past 10 years. Modern quality assurance (QA) groups struggle to play their role in a world of continuous delivery, leading to more defects in production, low QA morale and excessive testing overhead. Thankfully, innovations in machine […]
Dissecting the Role of QA Engineers and Developers in Functional Testing
Until a few years ago, quality assurance was generally considered low-level R&D. As a result, quality assurance (QA) teams were characterized by a low budget, lack of attention and, more often than not, poor attitudes. Moreover, QA engineers were considered the enemies of developers and the product. However, today, this is no longer the case, […]
QA/Testing and DevOps: Partners, Not Adversaries
Software testing and QA is sometimes given low priority during development. The idea of treating software testers as adversaries by the developers seems old-fashioned and is short-sighted. It’s hard to believe that such an attitude can still exist, and yet it still persists, even in a modern DevOps team. But a DevOps-focused software team benefits […]
Moving from ‘Tester’ to ‘Quality Enabler’
Speed versus quality. Can you really have one while the other exists? When Agile came on to the scene, it pushed to get development teams to create code as quickly as possible. Then DevOps came on as a practice that helped these Dev teams and the Ops side of the house to interact and collaborate […]
Q&A: Michael Beckley, CTO/CCO, Appian
Recently I had the chance to speak with Michael Beckley, chief technical officer and chief customer officer at Appian, about his company’s move to go public and the DevOps space in general. For those of you who don’t know Michael, he is a founder of Appian and leads the company’s technology vision and oversees customer […]
ShiftLeft & DevOps: A Narrative Within a Narrative?
I procrastinated watching the season finale of “Westworld” just because I ended up reading a day later how Dolores ended the episode! I don’t know who to blame: my inquisitiveness or that guy who couldn’t hold himself. It kind of feels stale when you know the ending. Finally, I finished weeding through the multiple narratives […]
How Much QA is Enough in Software Development?
People working in quality assurance as testers, managers or engineers know what it’s like having to justify their existence; it’s been part of the job for many years. QA experts have had to fight the perception that what they do is a bottleneck, overkill and it slows everyone down. Finally, however, QA is getting the […]
Getting the Most Out of QA in Complex Environments
We live in a world in which software is increasingly dominant. Not only do we rely ever more on software, but its complexity is becoming even greater. And with increased complexity, bugs are more likely to be intermittent, making failures difficult to reproduce. Sometimes this non-determinism results in failures never getting fixed. Any unfixed bug […]
The Tester: Saving Your Soul in a DevOps World
Software testers have seen their careers go through some ups and downs in recent years. In the days of Waterfall, the tester’s job was clearly defined. Like other functions of software development and delivery, testers lived in a neat and tidy universe, testing features and design, finding bugs, sending back feedback to developers for correction […]
All Day DevOps: System Hardening with Ansible
The DevOps pipeline is constantly changing. Therefore, relevant security controls must be applied contextually. We want to be secure, but I think all of us would rather spend our time developing and deploying software. Keeping up with server updates and all of the other security tasks is like cleaning your home: you know it has […]
Reality Check: Bringing Continuous Delivery Dreams to Life
Every developer shares the same dream: to write a piece of code or app that changes everything. Whether it makes your company do things more efficiently, attracts hordes of new customers, simply makes existing clients happier or maybe even changes the world a little bit, that code is what we strive for. Some of us […]
4 Top Tips for Developing a New Feature
As a backend developer at CA BlazeMeter, I recently had the chance to work on a big feature for our web app. The feature required a massive change on our backend code, a big change on our frontend and multiple migrations. You know what I’m talking about—it was one of those projects that developers fear. […]
Don’t Leave Software Testers Out of DevOps
The term DevOps implies that software delivery is all about integrating the development and IT operations teams. But the software testing team is an important, if oft-overlooked, part of the picture. Here’s why. Could you deliver software continuously without involving the QA team in the continuous delivery pipeline? You could try, but it would probably […]
DevOps and the Identity Conundrum
“Who am I?” It is perhaps the most basic question of consciousness. The answer could be subdivided by aspects of my life story … my career, my family, my beliefs, my education … the list could continue. But since I am unique, the challenge in this digital age is for me to somehow remain unique, […]
Putting Ops Back in DevOps
What Agile means to your typical operations staff member is, “More junk coming faster that I will get blamed for when it breaks.” There always is tension between development and operations when something goes south. Developers are sure the code worked on their machine; therefore, if it does not work in some other environment, operations […]
DevOpsQA NJ Meetup – Test Automation Tech Talk
DevOpsQA NJ just held our August Meetup on Test Automation Tools and Processes with Polina Rodov and Kamlesh from Medidata, Anil Jaising from JP Morgan Chase and myself, Tanya Kravtsov, from Audible. The venue, food and refreshments were provided by Audible at a state-of-the-art, vast office space in Jersey City with amazing views of the NYC skyline. The […]
The ‘Continuous’ Illusion
Continuous delivery is an illusion. That doesn’t make it insubstantial—illusions can have a tremendous impact. Like the first motion picture: the locomotive felt so real to first audiences that they fell from their chairs, screaming. But of course, the locomotive was an illusion, merely rushing past on screen. A good magician, like a good inventor, […]