From DevOps to NetOps, many new variations of the term are appearing in 2020. Similarly to its siblings, QAOps refers to the practice of integrating quality assurance into the development process efficiently instead of isolating it as a separate practice conducted by a separate team. This approach can be incredibly beneficial when done correctly.
While QAOps is not yet an official term, learning about it can help you understand the impact of effective quality assurance on your business and help develop better QA practices for your development needs.
What is QAOps?
Software testing is frequently challenging as it requires meticulous and time-consuming repetition. Many businesses opt for third-party services to ensure the quality of their products. To learn more about quality assurance services offered by the best development companies on the market, read here.
If you decide to conduct QA internally, the QAOps approach is one of the best solutions. QAOps strives to integrate the testing into your continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) pipeline, bringing the operations, IT, development, and quality assurance teams together.
The Benefits and Impacts of QAOps on Software Development
QAOps brings together several departments, making the development faster and more efficient. Overall, the main benefits of QAOps include:
● it grants more time to work on additional features and upgrades by making the development process more robust;
● the development and operations teams gain the opportunity to understand the product better by viewing it from different angles, and, as a result, it becomes easier to fix bugs;
● the interaction between departments allows employees to expand their expertise, polish various skills, and grow professionally by learning from their colleagues;
● the QA team is constantly occupied, as opposed to projects where testing occurs at the last stage;
● the QA team works to test updates as they are being rolled out, enabling better performance and helping identify any issues earlier and avoid unnecessary expenses later in the development cycle.
The Main Elements of Successfully Implemented QAOps
Automated Testing
Quality assurance requires the team to perform numerous tests iteratively, meaning the same test cases frequently have to be repeated. Conducting all the testing manually, therefore, significantly increases the time needed for the QA process, along with the costs and other resources needed. From within the QAOps framework, manual testing is not a viable option.
To ensure that the QA team keeps pace with the delivery pipeline and remains an active and real-time participant in the development process, it’s necessary to automate as many tests as possible. Automating certain tests will also reduce the possibility of a human error connected to the repetition of the same test cases.
Parallel Testing
Another issue that greatly inhibits the speed of the QA process is serial testing. When using this approach, the team runs tests one-by-one, stretching the time needed to perform a complete testing cycle.
Parallel testing is crucial to QAOps. Running multiple tests simultaneously, combined with automation of the process wherever it’s applicable, can help you ensure your QA team aids the delivery pipeline instead of slowing it down.
Scalability Testing
Making testing scalable can be largely beneficial for your time and financial resources. Since the CI/CD pipeline fluctuates, it’s logical that the testing routine needs to accommodate for this change, scaling up and down correspondingly. To achieve scalable testing, focus on making the infrastructure for performing quality assurance flexible when first establishing it.
Bringing Development and ITOps Teams Into the QA Process
The key idea of QAOps is integrating the quality assurance process into your CI/CD pipeline. To achieve this, you need to promote close collaboration between the QA team and your development and IT departments. Start by involving the software developers in writing and validating quality tests, and assigning members of the operations team to uncover the main issues with user experience in the current projects. This strategy allows the QA team to interact with others more effectively and deliver results faster while remaining in charge of the testing process.
QAOps for Software Quality: Recap
Quality is imperative to the success of your application. As developing software becomes easier, faster, and cheaper, battling the competition requires more and more high-quality products. While using some quality assurance practices will help you polish the app, only a comprehensive and systematic approach will enable your company to gain an edge on the modern market.
QAOps is a model that strives to unify the development, IT, and QA teams. Regarding quality assurance and testing in the context of the whole development cycle is beneficial because it can uncover issues before they sink deeper into the app’s architecture. QAOps also strives to make the complete development cycle faster.
By implementing this approach, your business can achieve the impeccable quality of software while reducing the costs and time required to build the apps.
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