Reinventing The Role of Testers In DevOps

DevOps, the extension of agile software development approach, is the methodology that is transforming the way software and product development is taking place. Though, the name suggests that only development and operations are key while giving an impression that testing is not an essential part. However, technically it should be called DevTestOps.

Even though testing is as important as ever, but thanks to DevOps, the way testing is done and how it is done has been evolved completely. The role and skills of testers are changing; now the testers have to get involved from day one and be an essential part of the process.

These days, testers do not only have to test the application but also become comfortable with code and be able to analyze it efficiently. The focus shifts from testing alone to working as a part of the team and ensure that the quality is built into the development process. DevOps has made testing an equal responsibility of everyone in the team.

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Enterprises these days are witnessing a rapid adoption of DevOps to accelerate time to market and to respond better towards the ever-changing customer needs. DevOps has arisen from the inevitability of businesses to respond more quickly and market changes to attain competitive advantage and a rapid business growth.
DevOps calls for a higher level of integration between the stakeholders, from the process of writing the code, testing it, and then finally going forward with the code deployment.

The emphasis these days is on the use of automates testing tools and continuous integration. DevOps hazes the boundaries between the roles of the different contributors in the chain, commanding that everyone contribute across the entire SDLC.
Consequently, the QA engineers can configure automation test cases and develop automation frameworks at any point along the chain.

The Strategic Role of QA in DevOps

DevOps approach, emphasizes on testers and developers playing equally important roles. The boundaries of job responsibilities between a developer and tester have become bl urred.
QA ties together development and operations and supports them to collaborate to have applications and software up and running. In DevOps, everybody holds an equal responsibility for quality and stability, and also for the business success.

In DevOps, a developer has to think more like testers and constantly check their own code for impending errors. On the contrary, a tester whose responsibility is to test the software/ application using different testing methodologies and tools also fixes the code. In such a situation, organizations without a robust and definite QA testing strategy face troubles in meeting their goals for an accelerated delivery speed.
Having a QA strategy in place, together with the best practices, has become imperative as organizations are readily embracing the DevOps movement to facilitate effective software development and operations together with achieving superior user experience and quality.

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