What is DevTestOps and how can it transform Agile?

DevTestOps is now the new philosophy of Agile. By incorporating Continuous Testing, DevTestOps is the next level of DevOps. It ensures that not only does the product being developed is delivered at the expected time-to-market and user experience, but also has optimal test coverage. 

In this article, let’s learn some of the fundamentals of DevTestOps: what is it? What are its principles? And how is it done in parallel with DevOps?

What is DevTestOps?

DevTestOps is a culture, an environment where developers, testers, and operation engineers work together to improve quality, speed up delivery, and add value to the product.

DevTestOps has the qualities of both DevOps and Continuous Testing. On the one hand, testing in DevTestOps is early, often, and happens throughout the software development lifecycle – characteristics of continuous testing. On the other, it allows for quick and reliable releases – characteristics of DevTestOps.

The key difference between DevOps and DevTestOps is that the latter incorporates Test into DevOps. DevTestOps requires testers to provide continuous feedback to developers throughout every stage of product development. Thanks to that, DevTestOps improves the quality of the products being developed, and reduces the risk of finding bugs at later stages.

The goal of DevTestOps is to de-silo Test in DevOps, making testing and testers integral part of the DevOps culture.

Much like DevOps, DevTestOps is an iterative process of continuous improvement, involving various stages to achieve expected product quality.

1. Product Management: Defining and detailing requirements as well as their feasibility.
2. Software Development: Analyzing, designing, developing, and testing the software
3. Test Management: Analyzing the software’s specifications in addition to designing and executing test cases.
4. Continuous Integration: Merging code changes into a central repository (by developers). Recent codes are tested by executing the automation suite. 
5. Continuous Deployment: Developing software in sprints to ensure that software in each sprint after testing can be reliably released at any time. 
6. Continuous Monitoring: Providing feedback and issues when the application is in production, which the team resolves as quickly as possible.

DevTestOps Manifesto

DevTestOps have several manifestos. They mostly define how testing should be done in line with development and operations

1. Continuous testing rather than waterfall testing
2. Applying all testing activities rather than only automated functional testing.
3. Testing only those having values rather than testing everything.
4. Testing happens across the team rather than testing in siloed testing departments.
5. Focus on product coverage rather than code coverage.

How DevTestOps works

DevTestOps incorporates continuous testing into DevOps, hence underlining the importance of the testing process. This has changed how testers perceive themselves and how they are perceived in the agile software industry. Within DevTestOps, testers are key members, equal to developers and operation engineers. Their testing activities are essential throughout the development process.

In addition to typical DevOps activities such as plan, code, merge, build, monitor,…, DevTestOps includes the following testing types:

• automation testing tool: In DevTestOps, activities that are repeated regularly and can be automated should be automated. Automation testing helps testers spend less time on those repetitive tests and focus more on creating more use cases. 
• Manual testing: a test cannot be automated unless it has been run manually. No matter how much you want to do automation, some cases are just non-automatable. Thus, manual testing is essential and can not be replaced even in an automation-focused like DevTestOps.
• Exploratory testing: in this method, testers follow their instinct and experience with alike systems, instead of predefined requirements, to test.
• Ad-hoc testing: this testing is informal, where team members test the software as and when they want. Its rationale is that randomly testing software like this can help find bugs that may otherwise go undetected in more formal testing methods.

DevTestOps – a new way to achieve Agile

DevTestOps can transform the way products are traditionally developed. 

In the old SDLC, testing wouldn’t happen until the entire development was completed. This delay has two drawbacks. First, when bug detection is carried out near the end, the release time can be delayed by the time it takes to fix the issues. Second, fixing bugs when all the codes have been merged makes it even harder to isolate and resolve bugs.

In DevTestOps, the application is tested from the very beginning, through development, and until production. This helps in providing early feedback about the developed product to the developers and stakeholders which in turn helps in fixing the defects during early stages and reduces the cost of fixing.

DevTestOps breaks the walls separating developers, testers and the operation. Now all departments can play an integral role in product development, thanks to DevTestOps. Contrary to the old way, the product is owned by each of the team members. And each of them – not just the developer –  is equally responsible to make the product better.

From DevOps to DevTestOps

In recent years, due to the emergence of Agile, everyone now wants faster time-to-market and better user experience. As the combination of Development and Operations, DevOps is the key to achieve that. It synergizes software developers with IT teams. This high sense of collaboration helps build, and release software faster and more reliably. 

But there’s one area that deserves more attention in DevOps. It was the quality of releases, or in other words, the testing process. This is where DevTestOps is created – to meet the need for enhanced quality and detection of defects.

In DevTestOps, DevOps and continuous testing are merged by adding testing at strategic parts throughout the development workflow.

DevOps is when continuous integration is implemented along with continuous delivery and continuous deployment. Likewise, to enable DevTestOps – continuous testing needs to be integrated into the already available implementation of continuous integration + continuous delivery + continuous deployment.

In DevTestOps, testing happens at every stage and is automated, which brings the following benefits:

• Teams can discover bugs earlier and continuously, hence becoming more proactive to fix bugs, which ultimately contributes to timely delivery of the product.
• The regression cycle is reduced from weeks to hours thanks to automation.
• Besides time-to-market, continuous feedback can enhance builds’ reliability
• The synergy between developers, testers, and operations can get everyone on the same page to work towards the same goal.
• Automated build and deployment speed up the SDLC and avoid human error..
• Automation maintains the consistency of quality build after build and release after releases

DevTestOps tools

By automating repetitive and redundant processes, DevTestOps makes product development faster and simpler. Automation can be enabled with certain tools. Some tools that can support automation and the larger DevTestOps are:

• Automation Testing tools: allowing testers to define automated test cases and execute them. Example: Selenium, Appium, or Katalon Studio
• Version control Tool: keeping track of all changes made in the codebase. Example: GitHub
• Automatic code deployment tool: Automatically deploying codes daily without manual intervention. Example: Jenkins
• Configuration management tool: configuring, managing, deploying various kinds of services and applications to the system, which ensures the application and computer system are used consistently. Example: Chef, puppet
• Ticketing systems tool: raising defects and keeping track of their current status. Example: ALM, Jira
• Monitoring and provisioning tool: maintaining the system in large quantities clustered all across the globe. This tool maintains both the hardware and software infrastructure in a homogenous state. Example: Vagrant

Myths about DevTestOps

Testing in DevTestOps is 100% automated. At least until recently, 100% automated testing of an application is impossible. Thus, in DevTestOps, some scripts are run manually.

DevTestOps is a poor match for large teams and enterprises. The popular thinking is that collaboration is difficult for large-scale teams. However, it is thanks to DevOps that developers are required to get closer to customers to stay abreast of their changing demand, while testers are now closer to developers and business analysts/

DevTestOps is expensive. Such a transformation of culture as DevTestOps seems intimidating. But once everything is in place, the team can achieve:

• Better code quality because every effort is tested.
• Developers receive immediate feedback about the product
• Reduced time and cost of fixing bugs since they are detected earlier 
• Nearly zero human errors thanks to automation

Conclusion

DevTestOps is built upon continuous integration, delivery, testing, and feedback. It enables everyone in the team to have an equal role and understanding of the product being built. This synergy is essential to developing a product that is user-centric, at a high quality, and with fast time-to-market.

Read more: Comprehensive Guide to Software Testing in DevOps Environments.

At KMS Solutions, we help enterprises leverage modern methodologies like Agile and DevTestOps to transform product engineering. Learn how we can help you too.