Automate everything! That’s the most suitable description of DevOps culture. The culture quickly created job positions with the same name. Position, mostly focused on broadly defined automation, leading to fast product delivery. And the division was pretty simple: DevOps = Process automation, QA = Test automation. But is it the right approach? What about the (still more and more) popular “(Dev)TestOps” term?
Classical testers are now also very often responsible for the set-up and maintenance of the major part of the Continuous Integration or Continuous Delivery environment (especially the test automation part). The main problem from the business perspective is, like always, time! E.g. many start-ups and companies in a phase of early, dynamic growth cannot afford to waste too much time on test automation. How do you speed up the delivery process in that case? How do you quickly generate a valuable increment?
I’ll show you how to improve and speed up the testing and delivery process, using clever automation, in 3 steps:
1. Automation supporting manual regression testing activities
— One-Click test environment setup
— Preparing fully readable and executable test cycles and test cases
— Ensuring that an unchanged component is not double-checked or unnecessarily tested
2. Automation maintaining project workflow, transitions, and statuses
— Recognizing when an issue is QA ready vs. when it is dev ready
— Avoiding (very!) common misunderstandings regarding testable issues
— Assuring that functionalities have been released without reading documentation and changelogs
3. Automation enhancing bug catching and reporting during testing or normal application usage
— Comprehensive incorporation of all crashes with the bugs reporting system
— Immediate notification based on priority and severity threshold level
— Automatic preparation and update of reported bugs, including necessary statistics
All of that in the context of 5 good (TestOps’) friends: Test Management Tool, Project Management, Crash & Log Reporting System, Communication & Notifications Channel, and Continuous Integration Tool.
