Introduction
Quality Assurance plays a vital role in maintaining the quality of the software project. Generally, DevOps finds it difficult to deliver software projects on time without neglecting the quality of the software. That’s exactly where QAOps comes into the picture when we deal with the timely delivery of high-quality projects.
QAOps is nothing, but the amalgamation of Quality Assurance with the IT Operation and Development teams in order to deliver high-quality software at a faster pace. QAOps also eliminates the communication gap between the QA teams and the development teams in the Software Development Process.
Quality Assurance and Software Operations in short it is called as QAOps. It refers to integrating Quality Assurance into the CICD pipeline with a DevOps mindset.
QAOps is the practice of integrating quality assurance (QA) into the CI/CD pipeline. This means that the software testing process should be integrated into the CI/CD pipeline rather than being an isolated process. It requires the QA team to work closely with the development team and the operations team.
Implementing QAOps means giving the testing team a more important role in the software development life cycle. The backbone of the QAOps process is CI/CT/CD (i.e., continuous integration, continuous testing, and continuous delivery.)
Implementing QAOps
There are four main ways to approach the implementation of QAOps.
Automated Testing
With lots of tools and frameworks available in the market today, automated testing has become one of the reliable methods for software testing. Automated testing speeds up the software testing process because it is done by the computer. And obviously the computer is faster than a human being. Adding automated testing in between continuous integration and continuous delivery is one way to approach QAOps. The QA team should thoroughly understand testing use cases when it builds the automated testing tool. Because there is continuous delivery, any mistake in the testing tool would massively affect the quality of the product.
Parallel Testing
Parallel testing is used to test multiple parts or components of the application at the same time. The testing process for each component should be independent of the others. Parallel testing is most effective when you use automated testing. You can use different tools that provide parallel testing features, or you can use a concept of threads to achieve parallel testing, where you’ll write tests in your favorite programming language so that they run multiple processes at the same time. Parallel testing has hardware dependency. You will need a high-performance system with fast CPUs to implement it. Using cloud platforms will work better than your own architecture in such cases.
Scalability Testing
Business growth is good for the company. When you develop a product and people start liking it, you will have to scale it. Scaling the product includes adding more features and making the existing features better. With an increase in the product’s scale, there will also be an increase in the scale of necessary testing. Scalability testing test’s the application’s behavior when it is scaled up or down. Depending on how much the product is being used at any given moment, the number of customer requests can increase or decrease. So scalability testing helps you understand how your product behaves under different request loads.
Integrating Dev and Ops With QA
This approach involves integrating the QA process in the CI/CD pipeline. The developers who are building the process can write the test cases. The operations team, with help from the QA team, can work on identifying the problems or bugs in the developed product.
This will help you get a clear picture of the QA process across teams. And it will help you make the QA and the bug-fix process work more smoothly.
Where can QAOps be used?
As pointed out earlier, though the QAOps framework is more powerful with the help of automated browser testing, it does not rule out the possibility of performing manual testing on the application. Manual cross browser testing can be extremely useful to provide detailed information about the web-application, not to forget, you need unique test cases that can come only by manual testing.
With that said, let us look into particular types of testing, apart from cross browser testing, where the QAOps framework can be a handful
Importance
QAOps involves testing the product or a particular part of the product as and when the update is integrated, so that the QA team doesn’t have to wait for a new build. This improves the overall release workflow. To summarise, QAOps guarantees:
•Better quality product- Continuous testing maintains an effortless continuity in the CI/CD workflow by delivering faster and high-quality results, leading to a better product.
•Faster time to market- A high level of collaboration between various teams speeds up the entire workflow, thus shortening the delivery cycles.
•Improved testing and bug fixing- Improved reporting leads to a better process understanding, resulting in improved testing and bug fixing.
•Better customer experience- Continuous testing on an intelligent automation framework gives a high quality and a stable and reliable product, leading to a better customer experience.
Conclusion
Implementing QAOps can give your organization an upper hand over your competitors in the software development industry. Though, implementing it will require investments—in most cases, a great investment—it is completely worth it.
A lot of companies have already implemented the DevOps approach, and QAOps is the next logical step. And as an employee in the software development industry, it is important that you know how it works.