DevOps Quality Assurance: Major Pitfalls and Challenges

Recent years have seen a rapid evolution in software development, requiring shorter development cycles and more collaboration between QA teams and developers. DevOps is defined as a combination of processes and tools created to facilitate organizations in delivering services and applications much faster than they can through conventional software development processes. It helps increase customers’ confidence in the applications that an organization offers, thereby allowing the company to flourish and achieve its business goals faster.

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In this article, we discuss the major challenges that DevOps has faced with QA and offer workable solutions that enhance the quality assurance process. We will also explain why these solutions form a strong DevOps/CICD foundation and center around quality standards.

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Common Challenges of DevOps Quality Assurance

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With the emergence of DevOps, testing moved to the front of the development process. DevOps involved QA considerably earlier in the software development lifecycle and required much more interaction between QA teams, developers, and operations teams. The new goal was to test early and fail fast and to address problems when they were far less expensive to fix.

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To support continuous testing in a CI/CD pipeline, QA moved away from manual testing methods to automated testing. Automated testing that focuses on scalable and incremental deployments is needed to support faster development speed. 

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Here are a few of the most common challenges DevOps has faced with QA:

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Environment Consistency

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Using a standardized environment will reinforce the DevOps QA process. Testing in environments that differ largely from production environments, are inconsistent, and assembled with different configurations can make it difficult, if not impossible, to isolate software issues. 

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It’s essential to ensure that testing environments closely match a production environment and these environments are identical and remain consistent. Further, it’s recommended that developers and operators automatically provision and configure these environments to remove this top DevOps bottleneck in a DevOps CI/CD pipeline. 

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Automation vs. Manual Testing

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While the Agile and DevOps approach has grown popular, many organizations lack the automated technology to support continuous testing. DevOps and automation are dependent on one another. It's not possible to support a CI/CD pipeline using manual testing methods alone.

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QA teams in DevOps should use the appropriate automated testing tools and test cases and oversee the effective application of those testing processes. Automate all common DevOps testing, such as functional, unit, load, stress, and regression testing. Further, automated testing should occur early in a CI/CD pipeline to ensure stability and software quality.

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Cultural Shift & Collaboration

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Contrary to popular belief, DevOps does not replace QA participation or oversight requirements. It will, however, necessitate a change in how QA plans and does testing in a DevOps environment. DevOps quality assurance will require a considerable cultural shift away from traditional testing methods and more development, operational, and QA team collaboration.

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Concentrating solely on applying technology and methodologies alone can distract from the need for larger organizational change. When adopting DevOps, it can be easy to overlook change management. When change management gets addressed at the start, it can speed up development cycles and improve software quality.  

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You can quickly resolve many QA problems in a DevOps environment by continually improving communication and collaboration. Because the QA, operations, and development teams have traditionally operated in isolated groups, it’s vital to foster communication and ongoing feedback across these teams.

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Copado Robotic Testing for QA in DevOps

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Copado Robotic Testing delivers continuous quality for any integrated CI/CD pipeline. Our cloud-based, low-code test automation solution will help your QA team avoid common testing bottlenecks, run comprehensive tests at every stage of a pipeline, and release high-quality software, faster. 

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Copado testing solutions enable QA teams to replace time-consuming, repetitive, manual tests with automation, not replacing human testers. Our automated testing tools will support continuous testing and free up your team to focus back on innovation and strategic testing that requires human oversight. 

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Copado Robotic Testing for DevOps Quality Assurance

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The above solutions are the basis of a strong DevOps CI/CD foundation. These processes are necessary to uphold quality standards. Automated testing is a core component of continuous testing and is necessary to support faster development speed. Testing code early and often throughout the software development life cycle will allow you to isolate issues and fix bugs before they end up in production. 

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Contact us today if you’d like to learn more about how Copado can support DevOps Quality Assurance and integrate with any CI/CD pipeline!