Best Automated Testing Tools for DevOps

Gautam Bhatia
IEEE Student Branch DIT University
5 min readFeb 18, 2021

Businesses have adopted agile and DevOps as software development models, to achieve quality and speed Continuous Integration , Continuous Testing and Continuous Delivery to aid businesses produce reliable goods at a faster level. Continuous testing is the process practiced to determine the business risks associated with the introduction of software. It is a part of the software delivery pipeline. Continuous testing software aims to analyze business risk coverage.

Test automation is a key factor in succeeding with continuous integration and delivery, for adding small frequent changes deployed to production. Continuous Delivery is performed with the help of tools & team but the Continuous Testing process includes the involvement of tools, teams, individuals, and services.

Continuous Integration is a process that inculcates the changes made to the code or addition of functionalities developed by the developer to the major software product. This makes the continuous testing process very critical.

A build is started by validating these changes. The automated tests are then processed on this build. This complete process gets and addition through the Continuous Delivery process. The testing process makes sure that the changes can be delivered flawlessly.

Along with continuous testing, continuous delivery is also an automated process. Developers can release the application or changes with just one click. The integration of Development and Operations brings a whole new perspective to software development. If you’re new to DevOps practices, or looking to improve your current processes, it can be a challenge to know which tool is best for your team.

1. Gradle

Every DevOps tool stack needs a reliable build tool. Apache Ant and Maven have dominated the automated build tools market for many years, until Gradle showed up in 2009, and its popularity has rapidly grown since then. Gradle is a versatile tool which allows you to add your code in languages like Java, C++, Python . Gradle is supported by many IDEs such as Netbeans, Eclipse, and IntelliJ IDEA. Google also used it as the official build tool for Android Studio.

Gradle introduces a Groovy-based DSL for describing builds. Gradle does not have a steep learning curve, so it will help if you have used Groovy or another JVM language before. Besides, Gradle uses Maven’s repository format, so dependency management will be familiar if you have prior experience with Maven.

The best feature about Gradle is incremental builds, as they save a nice amount of compile time. Gradle approx 100 times faster than Maven. Gradle also allows faster shipping and comes with multiple of configuration possibilities.

2. Git

Git is most popular DevOps tools, widely accessed across the software industry. It’s a distributed source code management tool, used by remote teams and open source contributors. Git empowers you to track the progress of your development work. You can save different versions of your code and return to a previous version when required. It can be used to create separate branches and merge new features only when they’re ready to go.

To integrate Git with DevOps workflow, you need to host repositories where your team members can commit their work. The two best online Git repo hosting services are GitHub and Bitbucket. Both GitHub and Bitbucket have awesome integrations with possible integration them with Slack, so everyone on your team gets informed whenever someone makes a new commit.

3.Bamboo

Bamboo is Atlassian’s CI/CD server solution that contains many similar features to Jenkins. Both are popular DevOps tools that enable you to automate your delivery pipeline, from builds to deployment while Jenkins being open source. Bamboo offers many pre-built functionalities that may take time to set up manually in Jenkins.Bamboo seamlessly integrates with other Atlassian services such as Jira and Bitbucket. You can also access built-in Git and Mercurial branching workflows and test environments.

4.Docker

Docker is the number one container platform since its launch and continues to add improvements . It’s also claimed of as one of the most important DevOps tools out there. Docker made containerization the ‘new trend to follow’ in the tech world, mainly because it makes distributed development process fluid and automates the deployment of your apps. It isolates the applications into separate containers, making them portable and secure. Docker apps are OS , and platform independent. You can use Docker containers in place of virtual machines.

Docker integrates with Jenkins too. Using it with one of these automation servers, you can further improve your delivery workflow. Docker is also useful for cloud computing. These recent years, all major cloud providers such as AWS and Google Cloud have added support for Docker. If you are planning a cloud migration, Docker can ease the whole process for you.

5.Kubernetes

Everyone is talking about Kubernetes. It acts as a container orchestration platform that takes containerization to the next level. It also works well with Docker and most of its alternatives. Kubernetes is still new as its first release came out in 2015, and still it is the next logical step when you gain a certain level of complexity and have a need to scale your resources. Kubernetes empowers you to automate the process of managing hundreds of containers.

With Kubernetes, you don’t have the need to tie your containerized apps to a single machine, you can deploy it to a cluster of computers. Kubernetes automates distribution and scheduling of containers across the cluster. A cluster in Kubernetes consists of one master and several nodes for the worker. The master node follows the predefined rules, distributing the containers to the nodes of the staff. Kubernetes pays heed to everything. For example, when a worker node is down, it notices, and redistributes the containers whenever appropriate.

Conclusion

Businesses have adopted Continuous integration Continuous Development to gain speed and quality. Testsigma and qTest Pulse are great for continuous testing. Selenium,is best for Automation Testing. Jenkins and Bamboo have good features for builds. Docker is popular DevOps Testing Tools. Jira is well known for planning and GitHub for version control.

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