The rise of cloud-native tools has made it possible to more easily automate and deploy applications. Consequently, there has been a proliferation of agile, cross-functional practices for facilitating the software delivery process. These practices include DevOps, BizOps, TestOps, CloudOps, AIOps, MLOps, and DataOps, which all come under the umbrella term of XOps.
The goal of the XOps movement is to speed up software development through collaboration among teams and increased automation, while improving the quality of data and analytics deployments.
A crucial part of that movement is TestOps, in which teams increase test suites at scale, managing these tests effectively without reducing the speed of testing efforts. This article will examine TestOps practices and demonstrate how to implement them in your organization.
How Does TestOps Work?
As organizations move toward continuous integration (CI), in which each change made to a shared repository is automatically verified by an automated build and test, they need to be able to scale the test automation so they can meet the ever-growing demand to deliver software quickly without sacrificing quality.
Running a few automated tests during the CI process is entirely different from running hundreds and thousands of tests. This is where TestOps shines. You can use it to seamlessly scale and manage your automated tests.
There are several stages involved in TestOps, as outlined below:
- Planning/Data Preparation: This stage of the TestOps process involves preparing data that will be used for tests during continuous integration and continuous delivery (CD), as well as providing answers to critical questions. Here are some of the questions that must be answered.
How will the software be tested? This could involve unit, integration, load/performance, user acceptance, or end-to-end tests.
What are the priorities for testing? How will it be tested? This addresses the order in which the testing will be carried out. Testing priorities are generally based on the team’s requirements or on customer feedback, to fix bugs in the product.
Who will do the testing? This identifies the stakeholders involved. Stakeholders can include members of the security, development, or quality assurance teams.
- Control/Test Ownership: This next stage ensures accountability, as all the stakeholders take ownership of each part of the software. It also involves monitoring tasks to be performed and controlling the flow of processes. Some change control processes used here include code reviews and merges. For example, the code review might be about increasing the test coverage of the application, which can be tested by running the tests and comparing the results of the old
vs. the new coverage. - Management: The continuous testing across teams leads to an increase in the number of tests, and naturally an increase in the complexity of the software. Management in the TestOps process ensures that no matter the number of tests, they can be scaled effectively and efficiently without sacrificing quality.
- Insights: This stage involves gathering metrics and feedback from the system. The data gathered is used to improve the testing process and make more informed operational decisions. It also helps stakeholders to understand the quality of the product and the team’s effectiveness.
Benefits of TestOps
Here are some of the benefits of using TestOps:
- Speed and quality: TestOps allows teams to move quickly by automating tests at scale without sacrificing quality.
- Improved time to market: Due to continuous test automation at scale and deployment, TestOps makes it easier to deliver value to customers fast. This gives the business a competitive advantage.
- Process ownership: TestOps makes stakeholders and team members responsible for each testing process. This ensures better quality software is released and with fewer bugs.
- Greater awareness and team participation: TestOps keeps all stakeholders more informed about the state of each process, making operations more transparent and improving collaboration.
- Repeats only failed tests: If your team focuses on rerunning only failed tests, you shorten the time it takes to run tests to completion.
- Stronger feedback mechanism: Because the feedback loop is faster and more efficient, you can act on that feedback more quickly and earlier in the process.
Tools for TestOps
There are multiple tools available on the market for implementing TestOps, and they fall into two basic types. CI/CD tools like Katalon TestOps help you orchestrate tests and integrate them into your development pipeline. These tools encourage faster releases and help teams deliver value to customers.
AI tools like Testim TestOps allow you to scale test automation using artificial intelligence. These tools study the behavior and performance of tests and use the information to improve and scale those tests.
Artillery.io
Artillery is a load testing tool written in JavaScript. Load testing is an automated and performance test used to check how a system responds to traffic, especially a high volume of requests. It determines how many users and concurrent operations a system can handle. Artillery works well for TestOps because it offers automated tests and several test suites.
Apache JMeter
Also a load testing tool, Apache JMeter is written in Java. It works at the protocol level to test the performance of REST APIs, web services, SOAP requests, and other types of applications. Its focus is on server or network apps, and it can be used to automate your web services and API tests at scale.
Puppeteer
Puppeteer, a test and automation tool from the Google Chrome team, is a Node library that uses an API to control headless Chrome. Using it, you can automate most of the actions you would perform with a Chrome browser. Puppeteer can be used for end-to-end testing; to automate the performance measurement of web applications; and for smoke testing, or verifying if a recently deployed application is running.
You can learn more here and read about use cases here.
Stryker
Stryker makes it easy to run mutation tests, or to change part of a code to see if the test cases can detect errors. This assures the quality of the test cases by confirming that they’re robust enough to fail a mutated source code. Mutation testing is often referred to as fault-based testing because it involves deliberately creating a fault in the program. It is a type of white-box testing and is mainly used for unit testing, which is a good way to scale test automation.
Testim TestOps
Testim is a platform that uses AI to make large-scale test automation easier. It recently launched TestOps features to help you manage your test suites, such as using branches and pull requests to regulate changes to test cases. It also offers a test owner feature, which allows you to assign owners to tests, then filter and report results by test owner.
Katalon TestOps
Katalon TestOps provides a platform for quality assurance orchestration, test analytics, and advanced reporting. Its intuitive dashboard provides a comprehensive report of the testing process and allows you to view the status of tests, giving you better insights into your test results.
Katalon TestOps also allows you to manage several processes, such as the cycles a software goes through during testing. This gives you a thorough understanding of how your tests are performing at scale, helping you to assure software quality at each stage without sacrificing speed or requiring DevOps expertise.
Conclusion
Adopting TestOps practices as part of your software development lifecycle (SLDC) offers several advantages, including lower costs for development, a faster development phase, higher-quality end products, and early release to the market. These practices can improve collaboration among teams and give your business a more competitive edge.
Integrating TestOps principles and practices isn’t always an easy process. It requires a gradual change in mindset across teams on how to approach software testing and delivery. This transition may be slow as a result of older processes and practices, but it gets better with time as team members and stakeholders see the benefits it provides.
By using the tools mentioned above, as well as others as part of an overall DevOps strategy, you can optimize your testing process, your team’s functionality, and your workflow, which will help you scale and improve your business.
