DevOps encourages practices that improve collaboration between the development and IT teams which speeds up the software development life cycle. The focus is on preventing defects and it also helps in knowledge, skills, and experience sharing between testers and developers.
The objective of testing in DevOps is the early detection of errors in the software development lifecycle. Functional testing like a unit and integration testing in the initial stage has a powerful impact on the overall testing process. Testers should start testing with whatever code is available even if the features are not completely developed. This requires a lot of documentation and collaboration within the team but it will lead to a better quality product in development.
Enterprises are keen to deliver apps as quickly as possible using techniques like continuous integration and deployment. There is a possibility to miss testing critical functions with the rapidly changing requirements. This is why it is important to agree upon detailed traceability of requirements to test functions.
The testing team works as a buffer between development and operations. The testing team should be involved right from the early stages of development for proper collaboration with other teams. This will enable the teams to communicate with each other and get support more effectively.
DevOps encourages frequent builds so there is a higher possibility of code-breaking existing functions. This is why it is not feasible to have testers do this verification manually. It is better to perform automated testing for these smoke tests.
When it comes to DevOps, quality requires a change in the way the process is being conducted. It is very necessary and also challenging to take an innovative route to identify unique techniques to test the app quickly and efficiently. Then there are other aspects like continuous delivery which is always supported by continuous testing which should be practiced.
In the traditional method, testers start their functional testing and regression testing once they get a build that is deployed in their designated environment. The tester would work on the build for a couple of days before approving it. But with DevOps, there are changes in the procedure.
Testers need to align their efforts in the DevOps cycle. They have to make sure that nearly all the test cases are automated and try to achieve full code coverage. They need to make sure that their environments are standardized and all the pre-testing tasks, cleanups, post-testing tasks, etc. are automated and aligned with the CI cycle.
DevOps requires a high level of coordination between various functions of the deliverable chain which breaks the boundaries between various roles of contributors. DevOps encourages teams to contribute to the process, so a developer can configure deployments, Deployment engineers can add test cases to the QA repository and testers can configure their automation test cases into the DevOps chain.