Organizations today are racing to develop software at a breakneck pace through efficient DevOps processes. But it’s important for them to avoid losing sight of the forest for the trees. If too much of that speed comes with quality sacrifices that degrade the user experience, the rapid software iterations hurt the business more than they help it.
“Organizations adopt DevOps to accelerate the delivery of innovative software that creates positive user experiences,” said Clark Golestani, former CIO at pharmaceuticals giant Merck and current managing director of C Sensei Group. “If you start accelerating delivery without also rethinking your approach to quality, you will end up rapidly delivering updates that drive your customers to competitors.”
This is why continuous and automated testing is so essential to DevOps success. But instituting effective and streamlined testing is easier said than done. Organizations must continually tweak what, how and when they test their software to achieve the optimal test coverage while introducing as little friction as possible into the software delivery pipeline. It’s a delicate balance, and the only way to achieve it is to keep meticulous track of metrics that evaluate how well the testing process is improving quality throughout the development life cycle.
“As the saying goes, ‘You can’t manage what you don’t measure,'” said Andrew Magarie, senior market impact consultant at Forrester Consulting. “So firms need to be able to define and track the right metrics that can help enable quality at speed while minimizing risk.”
Magarie and his team at Forrester recently conducted research into 94 different quality metrics frequently measured by DevOps organizations across four development stages: build, functional validation, integration and end-to-end regression testing. The study showed that the most effective test metrics that bubbled up across all of stages tended to clump into at least one of three categories.
Risk-Focused Metrics
According to Magarie’s report, the most mature and effective organizations fundamentally chose testing metrics that best helped them understand business risk posed by the software throughout the development process.
“For this study, we use the following definition of business risk: Any application shortcoming that impairs the end user’s (or customer’s) expected experience and ultimately erodes confidence in the business,” he explained.
For example, during the build stage mature organizations consider measuring the number of automated tests prioritized by risk as one of the most important assessments.
“Tracking ‘unit’ tests prioritized by risk is the key. As the code base evolves, developers and testers need immediate feedback about change impact. This feedback is significantly more actionable if prioritized by level of risk,” wrote Magarie.
As he explained, business risk will be different for every application, and the complexity of an organization’s architecture and transaction dependencies adds more variables to the equation. However, organizations need to seek ways to measure ‘relative risk’ across the software development life cycle (SDLC) if they truly want to take a disciplined approach to incrementally improving quality in their software.
Contextual Metrics
Forrester found that simple “counting” metrics don’t offer QA nearly as much value as contextual metrics. So simply tracking the number of tests will not provide teams with as much actionable data as the measurement of the ratio of requirements covered by tests. Approximately 69 percent of mature organizations say running functional tests and checking against covered requirements is a top measurement and 75 percent say the same about API tests run against functional requirements.
Holistic UX Metrics
The most mature organizations recognize that while application-specific or team-specific QA metrics are important, the ultimate goal is ensure the quality of the user experience (UX) across their entire interaction with an application. This means measuring the thoroughness of end-to-end regression testing is crucial. Approximately 70 percent of leading DevOps organizations say they believe the percent of automated end-to-end test cases as a top metric.
