3 Key-Topics About Software Development Levels
At DBServices, Test Automation & DevOps are a cornerstone of our approach to advancing our customers’ Software Development Maturity Levels. While recognizing the uniqueness of each scenario, but we return to the same topics when we perform Assessments and Audits.
Forget all about buzzwords at the first image — just to get your attention . We have identified three pivotal elements that always feature in our discussions aimed at fostering improvement:
1 - Version Control (VC)
Version control is a set of Practices & Tools for managing codebases. Software Engineers use version control to keep on-track every line of code, share, review, and synchronize changes with your team. GIT is the most popular version control tool, created by Linus Torvalds to support the open-source development of Linux, It uses a distributed repository model that can efficiently handle projects of any size.
One of the most practices used for version control is the Trunk-Based Development, is a branching model where most of the work takes place in a single trunk, usually called master, or main. The trunk receives daily merges from all engineers in the team. This practices simplify the version control, because the trunk is a single source of truth, minimizing chances of merge conflict.
2 - Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)
Continuous Integration (CI) is a software development practice where software engineers — following the trunk-based model — merge their changes to the main branch many times per day. CI is supported by Automated Tests that runs them on every change. As a result, failures are made visible as soon as possible introducing shift-left testing practices fixing the problems in advance.
Continuous Delivery (CD) is an extension of CI. Its goal is to automate every step required to package and release a software feature. CD is supported by Pipelines and the output takes the form of a deployable binary, package or container.
3 - Test Automation (TA)
Test Automation is integral to and inseparable from CI. The main benefit teams get from TA is the continuous feedback. Developers set up tests in the CI to check that their code behaves according to expectations and requires that all tests are automated without human intervention.
Automation Frameworks like Cypress, Robot Framework, Playwright and others accelerate the Feedback Loops and reduce the risk of introducing failures, creating a preventive approach. To do this well, it's nice to have a TA Foundation, which will ensure best practices for creating and maintaining these test scenarios.
Conclusion
These three pillars (VC+CI/CD+TA) are daily-basis to implement small improvements with our customers. With a Detect to Correct Approach, we have experts consultants to increase your software development maturity focused on Commit->Test->Deploy loop.
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