Why QAOps has become an Inevitable process in Software Delivery

In the contemporary world, all modern software companies’ requirements are not the same. Based on the requirements, their development, testing, and operation approaches may differ. Testing is no longer following stereotyped approaches but is also evolving dynamically based on system design, tools, and technologies. Since it involves a wide range of practices and technologies to keep up the quality. The new approach of testing satisfies all the layers called TestOps.

DevQAOps 

DevQAOps encompasses a wide range of practices and technologies that are used to improve the quality and reliability of software systems. It integrates IAAS + PAAS + SAAS as a process/discipline of managing and scaling the DevQAOps Cycle to maximize efficiency, delivery speed, and product quality.

Who needs Separate QAOps

• The larger Enterprise architecture involved multiple tools and technologies: Microblogging, E-commerce, Telecommunication, Infrastructure, Banking, and Healthcare. This larger enterprise has multiple teams like Frontend, Backend, multiple Service Layers (Microservices), Web Servers, Kafka, Caches, Multiple databases (RDMS & NoSQL), Monitoring tools, deployments version control, and Media Server (if applicable) It varies depends upon the domain and enterprise requirement. For a faster release cycle and systematic approaches, TestOps will help with deployment and environmental support.
• A product team wants their product to test with a variety of machines (i.e. ARM), a variety of Operating Systems with various versions, and its dependency libraries testing, more than functional environment-related testing plays a major role in such a team required Testops.
• Multiple product companies always share the Devops with every other team, so if you want your developers focused on development activities instead of sharing the responsibilities. You can enable TestOps Person/teams for their all-test product environments, which will help for faster collaboration and focused process.
• High-impact applications require multiple QA environments i.e. QA, Staging, QA-Automation, UAT, and Pre-Production.

• TestOps consists of the following components:

Planning

• TestOps is like DevOps planning, which involves.
• Identify the Goals, and requirements for the testing process.
• Determine the scope of the testing and types of testing required.
• Identifying the potential risk constraints.
• Timeline, Estimation, and milestone for the testing process.
• Testing schedule, resource allocation, and testing deliverables should be part of the test plan.
• Shift-Left, Shift-Right, and In-Sprint Automation Approaches are defined in the planning phase.

Additionally, the planning phase for TestOps should include identifying the tools and technologies that will be used to support the testing process and ensuring that the necessary infrastructure is in place to support the testing.

Shift Left Approach

The goal of shift left testing is to identify the bugs and resolve them as early as possible, testing will be started along with the design phase or during development. This approach reduces the costly bug.

Shift Right Approach

The testing is in the immediate pre-release and post-release phases (production). Customer Experience, correct behavior, performance, and availability are the key goals of shift-right testing.

In-Sprint Automation Approach

It’s the approach to automate the requirement/user stories within the same sprint it has been developed. without leaving any automation backlogs, which required good collaboration and potential automation testers.

Tools: Jira, Azure DevOps Board

Continuous Integration: CI

Continuous Integration is one of the key processes in TestOps which helps to automatically build, test, deploy, and deliver the software. CI can be applied for both development and automation code. Automating this testing process helps to detect and resolve the issues.

By Integrating the Test Automation/Performance into the CI Pipeline, teams can run automated tests each time code is committed, which helps to capture the issues in the early phase of development. The same process is applicable for the automation team to commit the code and run the verify pipelines.

• Quality Gates
• Static code analysis checks the code smell and security vulnerability.

Many tools are available in the market, SonarQube and ESlint are popular.

Tools: Jenkins, CircleCI, GitLab CI/CD, Azure CI/CD

Continuous Testing: (CT)

Continuous testing in Testops Another important process in Testops involves continuously running automated tests throughout the development process to ensure that changes don’t create new bugs or regressions.

Automate Everything in various layers as part of DevQAOps

Infrastructure automation: Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a method for managing infrastructure resources through code, rather than manual configuration. IaC tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation, or ARM templates enable infrastructure definition in code, versioning, testing, and deployment.

Tools: Terraform

Platform automation: Platform Automation or PaaS (Platform as a Service) Automation is the process of automating the deployment, and maintenance of applications and infrastructure on a cloud-based platform. This includes tasks such as provisioning resources, configuring networks, deploying software, and monitoring the performance of applications. The goal of PaaS automation is to simplify the process of delivering and managing applications, increase efficiency, reduce manual errors, and provide a more stable and scalable platform. It always intersects with the continuous deployment segment.

• AWS Elastic Beanstalk – Automates the deployment and management of applications on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform.
• Google App Engine – A cloud-based platform for building and hosting web applications.
• Microsoft Azure – A cloud computing platform that automates the deployment and management of applications.
• OpenShift – An open-source PaaS that automates the deployment, management, and scaling of applications.

example: PaaS automation with Terraform focuses on automating the deployment and management of platform-level components, such as databases, middleware, and other managed services.

Tools: Terraform, Ansible, Azure, Aws

Test automation: The goal of test automation is to increase the efficiency and accuracy of testing, reduce the time and cost of manual testing, and improve the quality of the software.

Automate Everything: If something can develop the same thing can be automated and tested.

The testing approach (API, UI, or Mobile) will depend on the nature of the application and the requirements of the testing process. For example:

API testing is appropriate for verifying the functionality and performance of the application’s APIs. UI testing is appropriate for verifying the functionality and visual appearance of the application’s user interface. Mobile testing is appropriate for verifying the functionality, compatibility, and performance of mobile applications on different devices and platforms.

Tools & Library: Playwright, Selenium, Cypress, Eggplant, UFT, Ranorex, TestNg, NUnit, Cucumber…

Continuous Deployment: CD

Continuous Deployment is an integral part of environmental management, continuous monitoring, and platform automation. It will often intersect with these areas. Continuous deployment supports faster release cycles by automating and streamlining the deployment process, enabling teams to get new code changes into production more quickly and with less friction.

There are many deployment strategies for larger teams.

1. Feature Flags

2. Blue/Green Deployments.

3. Rolling update deployments.

Environment Management:

One of the key components of TestOps is setting up the environment. Test for interoperability and compatibility mainly depends on the environment. Set up the necessary infrastructure and configuration to meet the requirements. This can be achieved through IAC (Infrastructure as Code), Containers, and Container Orchestration. Help in deploying infrastructure, networks, virtual machines, load balancers, firewalls, policies, and all other connections. All of these IACs can be achieved through the following tools/vendors:

1. Terraform: The IAC engine helps to automate a variety of IAC tasks, supporting multiple cloud providers.

2. ARM (Azure Resource Manager): Only support Azure IAC

3. AWS Cloud Training: Only support AWS IAC

4. Google Cloud Deployment Manager: Only support Google IAC.

Containers and container orchestration play a key role in setting up and deploying environments. This means that developers/testers can test their apps on different operating systems, runtimes, and other software dependencies without worrying about conflicts or inconsistencies. Consistency.

Here are some specific ways to use Docker/Kubernetes for interoperability testing:

• Create a repeatable test environment:
• Tested on multiple platforms:
• Test in different runtime environments:
• Simulation of different environments:

Overall, Docker makes it easy to create consistent and repeatable testing environments and test apps across operating systems, runtime, and other dependencies, which can help ensure an application can interact with many types of systems. Docker is mainly focused on packaging and distributing applications, and Kubernetes focuses on organizing and managing those applications after they are deployed. However, Docker and Kubernetes are often used together.

Tools: Docker, Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, Terraform, Powershell, shell scripting, Yaml

Continuous Monitoring: CM

The continuous monitoring process monitors various metrics such as performance, security, and functionality, as well as continuous testing and updating of the application to ensure that it meets the required standards.

Choosing the correct tools for monitoring, such as performance monitoring tools, log analysis tools, or network monitoring tools. There are many tools in the market.

Performance Monitoring tool: Cloud-based monitoring tools monitor the performance of applications, servers, and infrastructure, and install the agents in servers to collect the data of the applications and servers.

Log Monitoring & Analysis tool: It will help to collect, analyze and visualize the data generated by the servers, applications and infrastructure.

Network Monitoring tool: monitor the performance of their networks and identify any issues that may affect network performance, configure it to collect data from your network devices, such as routers and switches.

Tools: DataDog, Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana), Splunk, Nagios, AppDynamics, SolarWinds

To summarize, QAOps is the process every organization needs with a strong hold on the operations with DevQAOps, with a focus shift of QA being part of Operations.