QAOps: What is QAOps and how to implement it to a software project?
Quality is a vital factor for a successful software product. Moreover, quality products will impress the clients. So, how can we increase the quality of a product? One of the main tasks we can do is test early and test often. QAOps gives the best solution to protect quality in software. Also, it accelerates the delivery to the customer.
QAOps is integrated testing with CI/CD pipeline instead of testing at indefinite intervals. This approach helps Software Developers and QA Engineers to collaborate more than the regular testing cycles. This QAOps framework will help to make a seamless bond between the QA process and software operations. Furthermore, it combines continuous integration and continuous delivery, and continuous testing to the same pipeline. The testing team plays a more critical role in the SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) with this concept.
Implementing QAOps
There are four main components to approach the implementations of QAOps:
Automated testing
Using automation testing is one way to approach QAOps to CI/CD pipeline. It reduces the testing time, and will improve the quality of the releases. In the industry, most commonly, automation tests are used for regression suites to save the quality testing time of QA engineers. The decision of which tests are automated is totally up to the QA team. The reason behind using automated testing for regression is to reduce the breaking of existing functionalities and to avoid bad user experiences with the growing software product. If there is any issue in the testing tool that will badly impact the software’s quality, it will be detected.
Parallel testing
Parallel testing is testing several components of the application at the same time. Those components should not be dependent on each other. It reduces delivery delays. This also can be achieved through automation testing by using several tools of the thread concept. However, there are several dependencies for this testing method; achieving this requires a lot of high-end computer facilities.
Test Scalability
The scale of the software product grows with users and when businesses are growing. At this time, testers must increase the testing scale to protect the product quality and retain clients. Scalability testing gives an idea about the application’s behavior when it has different user requests. So, the scalability testing should perform when the application is growing up or down.
Integrating Dev & IT Ops in QA
This refers to the integration of quality assurance to the CI/CD process. The developers can write test cases and operations, and the QA team can identify defects/ gaps in the developed product. This helps developers and testers to collaborate and gives developers an idea about the complete QA process.
Lifecycle of QAOps
The QAOps framework is built on three main stages:
1. Trigger
2. Execute
3. Report
1. Trigger: One of the essential aspects of testing is to trigger the relevant tests when code change happens in the CI/CD pipeline. Only the tests which are relevant to the functionality of code change should be executed. If all the tests are executed without considering the above fact, time and product quality will suffer. Also, it could miss out on a critical area and can cause unwanted issues in the application. It’s important to map the functionalities with the automated tests in a correct manner. This is the initial step of QAOps, and if these are finished as expected, the whole team would be confident about the new release.
2. Execution: After triggering, many tests are executed on functionality. It is vital to execute independent tests parallel to obtain faster results to have proper infrastructure. We also need to maintain a highly available environment to avoid any disruptions in the execution of tests.
3. Reporting: Once the trigger and execution are done, we need to do the reporting. This reveals the results, and it must contain a summary. Also, it must provide detailed information about tests, including the issues of any tests that failed. Reports should be available on-demand and you should be able to access the history of reports. It’s only then the stakeholders are able to compare the results.
Conclusion
In the software development sector, using QAOps might give you an advantage over your competition. Many businesses have already adopted the DevOps methodology, and QAOps is the next milestone. Knowing how it works is essential if you work in the software development sector.
References:
· https://www.lambdatest.com/blog/guide-to-implement-qaops-framework/
