3 Core DevOps Values for Testers to Know | TechWell

3 Core DevOps Values for Testers to Know

With DevOps, modern software teams of all shapes and sizes are aiming to deliver a high-quality software production early and often. Shifting testing earlier into your development lifecycle and smartly using test automation to reduce bottlenecks can create a more seamless, collaborative business.

But as testers have heard over and over again, this requires new skills to be learned and less manual testing to be used. Adam Auerbach, the vice president of quality and DevOps engineering at Lincoln Financial Group, spoke with StickyMinds during a recent interview and explained what he sees as the three core values testers in a DevOps environment need to keep in mind.

  • Automate Everything: Automation needs to be a major focus in your agile or DevOps testing. Auerbach argues that DevOps is all about lead manufacturing and driving flow, so you need to know your testing wait times, the manual constraints that might be holding you back, and how correctly automating certain areas can greatly cut back your lead time.
  • Push for Fast Feedback: On a successful DevOps team, the developer should be able to check something in and get test results back quickly so that they know whether or not something is working. DevOps demands fast feedback for unit tests, integration tests, performance, and security. Testing needs to be shifted far enough left that developers are able to see what’s broken, fix it, and move on before it becomes a major problem down the line.
  • Focus on Flow: “The whole purpose of DevOps is to be able to deliver a high-quality software production early and often. Again, how do you remove those bottlenecks through test automation?” Auerbach asks. “How do you remove constraints on environments through different third parties that, maybe, have Selenium grids in the clouds that allow you to do all the browsers or devices? How do you use containers to spin up and spin down environments? You have to embrace all of those different enablers so that you can focus on flow.”

By putting a greater emphasis on automation, making sure you work with your developers to ensure faster feedback (and guarantee quality early on), and maintaining a steady flow throughout the process, testers can be the driving force for DevOps.

Instead of being seen as the end of a long process, testing can act as the spark that allows your entire DevOps team to work better than it ever has before.

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