Previously, we said that DevTestOps brings continuous testing to DevOps, by testing everywhere, testing early and testing often.
Let’s go further and explore some of the key concepts that drive DevTestOps in more detail.
Hey DevOps, Don’t Forget Quality!
In their book, DevOps: A Software Developer’s Perspective, authors Bass, Weber and Zhu state that DevOps is “…is a set of practices that helps reduce the time between committing a change to a system and committing the change into normal production – all the while ensuring high quality.”
But often there is so much focus placed on speed of delivery that the quality aspect falls through the cracks, and many organizations have now realized that DevOps minus continuous testing is simply a faster route to produce buggy software.
That’s where DevTestOps steps in!
DevTestOps to the Rescue
DevTestOps is gaining currency as a concept because it fosters an even stronger culture of collaboration among all the teams involved, from operations to developers to QA and business analysts.
To build a successful Continuous Delivery pipeline, you must reduce the cost, time and risk of delivering software changes. You can do this by enabling more incremental updates to applications in production.
Gradually, as you automate your Continuous Delivery pipeline, the next logical step is to include more quality control steps in your pipeline process. You can do this either by using test-first approaches like test-driven development, acceptance test-driven development, and behavior-driven development. Or by frequently running automated scripts to test out the new features.
As your software release cadence picks up, you should ideally store and reuse the suite of automated test scripts in future. These scripts can also be a part of test automation frameworks and used to assure project stakeholders that testing is thorough and adequate.
The DevTestOps Equation
Agile companies are all striving to go “continuous.” A DevTestOps model helps achieve this continuity and reduce the gaps because it ensures the focus stays on quality. DevTestOps is gaining currency as it enables seamless and reliable development of software.
Remember the DevTestOps Equation:
Continuous Testing + DevOps = DevTestOps
