Is your DevOps on crutches without Test Automation?

The world is rapidly changing, and so are the market's and users' needs and requirements. As a result, agile development processes are widely adopted to ensure product development stays in sync with the changing world.

However, rapidly changing products need agility and alignment with the operations and DevOps. DevOps lowers barriers between the development and operations teams to release products faster and seamlessly. While DevOps is a methodology or a way of working, we cannot overlook the importance of automation in the entire process.

Why are tools and automation so crucial for DevOps?

While tools and automation without the right mindset will not deliver the expected results, it should be noted that the mindset without the right tools and automation will also fall short of expected results.

The reason is that even well-defined processes are not well executed in the absence of proper control and governance. If these controls and governances are automated, it helps adhere to the required processes.

Further, it helps meet the objective of faster deployment. And when an action’s responsibility is moved to a machine to carry out, it becomes more repeatable with a higher degree of objectivity and is much faster. Hence, automation tools are an inseparable part of any DevOps strategy.

A bottleneck in automated DevOps

You try to automate the entire DevOps process. First, your code is saved in a shared repository and merged with the code of others, and conflicts are resolved (largely automated and sometimes manual). Then, based on an automated trigger, the dependencies of your code base are resolved, and the product is built. Finally, the required infrastructure is provisioned, and the built product is deployed on it.

All has gone well, barring one big issue - We still do not know that the built and deployed product even works. We do not even know if even the already working functionalities are broken because of build or environment errors. Therefore, a successful deployment does not guarantee that we deployed a successful product.

So now, the code needs to be tested by the QA team.

That will take its own time, and manual testing can take a while, sometimes even a lot more time than was needed to develop the incremental change because even the existing code has to be tested for regression.

This slows down the entire process dramatically. As a result, a large amount of speed and agility gained in the deployment process is primarily lost. Remember that a chain's strength is defined by its weakest link.

Bring your DevOps strategy back on its feet with Test Automation

The solution is pretty straightforward. Like other parts of the delivery chain, testing too must be automated.

Automated tests can run without human intervention and generate test reports and logs. Not only can you test the application through the UI, but you can also automate the testing of backend components and APIs. With automation, you can test the new and existing functionality before every release to ensure that the application is in good shape.

Automated testing takes a small fraction of time compared to manual testing, and most importantly, it can happen as a part of your DevOps sequences while you are sleeping. Automating application testing eliminates the weak link in your DevOps strategy and will start to deliver the benefits you have been waiting for.

To further improve the effectiveness of this strategy, it is important to ensure that hybrid cloud observability is leveraged to gain visibility into the cloud-based infrastructures of your organization.

Wishup’s Software testers can easily automate your software testing to give your DevOps the boost it requires. To know more about our software testers and the value they can add to your test automation process or hire one, visit our website Wishup.co, or just email us at [email protected] for a free consultation.