The introduction of DevOps has changed the role of the quality assurance (QA) team. Earlier, the role of QA was all about functional testing and regression after a product is deployed. The DevOps approach focuses on automating the entire process in software development to achieve speed and agility. It also includes automating the testing process and configuring it to run automatically.

Automated software testing is an integral part of the entire DevOps process and helps achieve speed and agility. This reduces human intervention in the testing process as automation frameworks and tools are used to write test scripts.

Agile Environment

It has additionally been seen that under agile conditions, the quantity of tests keeps on expanding dramatically across every iteration, and an automation software would proficiently deal with it and guarantee early admittance to the market.

Besides, under Agile, automated functional testing guarantee the product performs rapidly and precisely according to the prerequisites.

DevOps environment

Automation tools play a significant part in accomplishing the execution of CI/CD/CT. DevOps accepts a culture shift; it breaks data silos to build, test, and deploy applications to achieve quality product with decreased deployment times. Accordingly, test automation is without a doubt the key to the achievement of DevOps.

How does Test Automation fit in DevOps?

Under DevOps system, the manual testing occurring in corresponding with the code development does the trick the Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery (CD) and Continuous Testing (CT) measure. The organizations face a ton of difficulties, for example, time limitations for development and test cycles, testing on different devices, applications and programs, equal testing, and much more. Hence, the most productive approach to parallel testing of software in DevOps systems is to embrace a well-integrated and strong test automation arrangement.

Use automated test cases to detect bugs, save time and reduce the time-to-market of the product. Here are the benefits of including test automation in DevOps:

• Minimize the chance of human error as a software program does the test
• Handle the repetitive process where you need to execute test cases several times.
• Automatically increase reliability.

Significance of automated testing in the DevOps lifecycle:

From the above discussion, you can understand why test automation is essential in the DevOps lifecycle. DevOps demands increased flexibility and speed along with fewer bottlenecks and faster feedback loops. Under DevOps, organizations need to release high-quality products and updates at a much higher rate than traditional models. If performed manually, many aspects in the delivery pipeline may be slowed down, and the chances of error increase.

For example- traditional processes like regression testing are highly repetitive and time-consuming. Incorporating automation in testing as part of the entire software development process, can help free up the test resources and make engineers focus on more critical work where human intervention is needed.

A quick look at the growing importance of Test Automation Skills in DevOps:

Continuous Delivery and Continuous Testing

If an organization utilizes a continuous delivery strategy, its applications always exist in ready to deploy state. Using a steady delivery approach, the organization would incur lower risk when releasing changes incrementally to an application with shorter development cycles. The main element of CD is continuous testing that is directly connected to test automation.

Continuous testing is rolling out end-to-end automated testing services during all possible phases of the delivery lifecycle. Continuous testing enables engineers to catch bugs in the earlier development phase where they are less expensive to fix, thus lowering the chances of last-minute surprises. Continuous testing also ensures that the incremental changes can be reliably done simultaneously, making the application to be continuously delivered and deployed.

Take a look at the benefits of automated testing in the DevOps lifecycle:

Do you know? Automation played a crucial role in driving deployment and infrastructure processes across firms with 66 percent and 57 percent contributions respectively, thus driving organizations’ overall success through DevOps implementation.

Since automation frameworks and tools are used to write code to verify the functionality of an application, the human intervention is less. Since the DevOps approach compasses high product development speed that makes developers and customers happy, automated testing can speed up the testing phase of a product and make developers deliver more in less time.

Having an automated testing tool is a shared responsibility that empowers better collaboration among team members.

Test automation improves the reliability of products as test automation increases the coverage. It also decreases the chances of issues in production as human intervention is minimal.

Test automation tools produce consistent quality outcomes and reduce the risk by distributing the entire development in small teams that operate self-sufficiently.

With test automation tools, you will be leveraging automated compliance policies, controls, and configuration management techniques. All these things help you move quickly without compromising security and compliance.

With automation tools, you can quicken the responses to user feedback. Faster responses increase customer satisfaction and lead to more product referrals. As more and more companies focus on building a DevOps culture, communication between Development and Operations has increased. Nowadays, the responsibility of product quality is equally divided equally among testers, engineers, and Ops teams. Test engineers and developers have to write the automated test scripts and configure them fully to test the application.

The operations team monitors and does the smoke testing in the test environment before releasing it to the production environment. Therefore, test professionals have to refine their test automation skills if they are involved in any part of the development process. By introducing automation testing in the DevOps lifecycle, time spent on manual testing can be reduced. It can make QAs dedicate more time to helping everyone participate in the quality assurance process.

With the above discussion, we can say that DevOps and automation are two crucial components for organizations to streamline their development process. DevOps plus test automation results in:

• Facilitate cross-department collaboration
• Automate manual and repetitive tasks in the development process
• More efficient software development life cycle

As organizations have started prioritizing continuous delivery, implementing continuous testing through test automation will also rise. With the growth of test automation, it is necessary for people involved in software development to understand the test automation frameworks and tools that make test automation possible.

We know that rolling out automated tests across a large portion of your development pipeline can be intimidating at first. But, automated testing services is now recognized as one of the DevOps best practices.

Make sure you start by automating an individual end-to-end scenario and run that test on a schedule. Utthunga offers the right automation tools and the DevOps consulting services to get the most out of your automated testing model in DevOps.