QAOps: A Software Testing Trend

Talking about development these days, streamlining the entire software development lifecycle turns out to be an extreme hustle. Especially, when you need to ensure the product developed should meet all the defined guidelines, right from the framed requirements to ensuring early and successful deliveries, quality often takes a backseat on the way to creating sustainable technology.

As per a recent article by Forbes, poor-quality software costs organizations $2.8 trillion in the U.S. alone, according to the Consortium for IT Software Quality (CISQ). This means a product made with sacrifices on the quality aspect often turns out to be a shortsighted delivery strategy that ends up business and developers with the havoc of long-term troubles. Luckily, software testing has always emerged as a sustainable practice that has helped brands across the globe to yield technologies for life.

Earlier, it was only restricted to the wise use of Quality Assurance practices and DevOps solutions. However, the need for greater stability in the software development lifecycle made way for QAOps.

In short, QAOps is a quickly emerging testing practice that brings the best of speed and quality to the software delivery pipelines. However, most business organizations and developers are still not in touch with the whole concept of QAOps and how it adds more value to digital transformation initiatives.

In this blog, we will try to learn every detail surrounding the QAOps process while developing an understanding of what is QAOps, the work process for the framework, the use of QAOps frameworks, and the overall integration of QA with DevOps and Test processes.

Let's begin!

QAOps: The Definition

Though there is no potential definition available to explain the concept of QAOps, the agenda behind the use of QAOps lies in 2 major principles:

• Integration of DevOps with CI/CD Pipeline.
• Improved collaboration between QA engineers and developers.

All in all, QAOps is meant to establish a QA process that is more synchronized to pull QA teams together on their way to DevOps operations in order to create highly functional products.

QAOps is often seen as next logical step in DevOps implementation driving the primacy of Quality Assurance throughout the software development lifecycle. Thus, QAOps can be considered as one of the top trends in DevOps that not only compliments the continuity requirements but offers enhanced speed on deliveries.  

How Does QAOps Work?

QAOps framework works on the principles of fusing DevOps throughout the development process and Quality Assurance process to ensure highly collaborative outcomes. Meant to improve the quality and workflow of the software delivery process, QAOps helps to prevent any sacrifices made on quality. Besides, the process helps to foster a highly integrated operational delivery model that can help yield long-term results.

It is more of a practice that brings QA first approach into the software development lifecycle, unlike the standard practices that keep pass/fail checkpoints for the release. QAOps helps to define a prominent role of testers and developers in the development and delivery process while analyzing the product for any issues. More importantly, QAOps frameworks accelerate the value that flows to the customers, users, and the organization behind the product.

Above all, QAOps frameworks work on a process that runs on cross-functional dashboards that have space for continuous integration, continuous delivery, continuous testing, and DevOps all into the same pipeline.

Applications of QAOps

As we have discussed earlier, QAOps promotes engineering collaboration in the software development lifecycle. Especially, when DevOps is crucial to meet digital assurance and testing goals, aligning QAOps into the process makes things much easier. The process aids to take down any communication issues that may occur at any stage of development between developers, testers, and business executives while allowing a more contemporary model for technology development.

The approach also helps to dodge the standard practices where QA usually takes binary place in QA tests that occur just before the release. Here we have 4 quick applications of QAOps that will help you develop a better understanding of QAOps and its benefits to the testing process.

1. Automated Testing

Automation testing is one of the most essential components of modern-day QA test practices. It not only helps to have a quick check on expected and actual outcomes but even helps you automate the most mundane tasks of the QA process.

Since automation testing demands rapid measurement of the quality through various stages of development, QAOps helps to fasten the feedback loop. However, QAOps helps to fasten the feedback loop. However, amalgamating QAOps with automation demands a thorough study of the product for the predefined goals, requirements, specifications, and expected functionalities.

Also, QAOps allows testers to identify the tests that must be automated at priority depending on the progress stage of the project. On top of that, automated testing even helps to tailor the product saving time and adding more relevance to the test data.

2. Parallel Testing

The next major application of QAOps can be traced with parallel testing, a technique where multiple test cases are run for an application while checking for compatibility on different browsers and operating systems. Such testing helps to reduce the test time and encourage the CI/CD pipeline while yielding more value from QAOps.

Parallel testing even complements the QAOps with accelerated testing allowing rapid production of the data for different hardware and infrastructure. But the process demands keeping a check on increased data processing load which requires utilizing a testing cloud that can handle several tests in tandem.

For specific scenarios, where the server has the capacity to allow smoke and automation tests to run in parallel, it becomes easier to process CI/CD pipelines. Parallel testing even helps to identify flaky tests for all passing and failing results in order to eliminate unstable outcomes.

3. Test Scalability

Since it is necessary to meet the scalability benchmarks for all the existing products, QAs and Developers have to accommodate customer feedback for improving the current features and adding more to the functionality.

However, scaling a product even needs a careful scaling of the existing test plans as it needs to take care of increasing user requests. QAOps helps testers to work on scalability goals by measuring the application performance on different conditions with ease.

Also, the information related to scalability can then be used to fasten the manual requirements and prevent the hassle of running through different models, methods, objects, and features. Besides, QAOps for test scalability reduces the complexity of the tests and allows faster app building.

All in all, quality assurance solutions help to meet the goals related to the scalable infrastructure and perform testing with all the necessary speed requirements for the quickest yet reliable deployments.

4. Smoke Testing

Build verification or confidence popularly known as smoke testing is meant to check the stability of the build. QAOps approach for smoke testing allows testers to check on any bugs that don't work or are not fixed when developers are ready to install a test build. Ultimately, the QAOps model allows developers and testers to avoid any waste of time working on broken builds that are likely to fail.

DevOps and QAOps: An Integrated Approach

When testers, developers, and business executives all aim to yield quality to meet the ultimate business objectives through DevOps, QAOps helps to establish the path to meet such goals with ease. However, the only thing where testers and developers struggle with achieving QAOps goals is integrating IT, development, and quality assurance, all at the same time.

And the only solution to overcome such struggles is the active involvement of the team. For instance, developers could project their focus on writing test cases while product designers and IT engineers could work on UX and UI testing. Such an approach to development and testing could allow meeting the ultimate goal behind QAOps and ensure effective testing right in tandem, throughout the deliveries.

The Crux

Summing it up, QAOps is an asset to digital quality assurance operations that establishes a balance between software development, quality assurance, and IT operations. Especially, when the digital world is looking forward to faster and continuous delivery cycles, QAOps helps to keep quality at priority.

Besides, the need for serving users with quality products and a pleasing user experience, developers and testers could help minimize neglected software development. Above all, it is the best way to bring quality assurance analysts and test engineers closer on their way to creating a lasting and delighting product journey for both businesses as well as end-users.