3 Ways to Build A Successful DevOps Testing Culture

Testing is an important part of the software development process and should be implemented across the development lifecycle to ensure a qualitative output.

However, most companies practice testing as an individual process that is dependent on other teams for test data and environment setup. This creates a lot of hurdles in the testing process, ultimately resulting in DevOps bottlenecks.

So, if you are experiencing delays or challenges in the software development life cycle, it’s time to reconsider your company’s testing methodologies and adopt integrated testing with development and operations activities.

[READ MORE: Derive ‘ROI’ from ‘DevOps’]

3 Ways to Build an Effective DevOps Testing Culture:

1)  Laying the Right Foundation

The initial challenge is to find the right basis to changing this unfriendly DevOps testing culture. For this, you will first have to enhance the skillset of your Quality Assurance (QA) team. The QA testing team should not only perform automated testing but also understand how the application is built as well and how the testing process can add value to its functionality.

Moreover, testers need to know about and understand processes such as continuous integration and Infrastructure-as-Code (IAC).

To enhance workforce’s skillset, you can train your testers or get vendors to replace manual testers with engineers. While it is still manageable with manual testers on board, it is advisable to hire testers with the relevant skillset.

2)  Redefine the Way Your Team Works

DevOps is a process that is focused on minimizing inconsistencies associated with dependency, repetition and delays through the culture of self-sufficiency.

Test automation in DevOps paves way for timely feedback and boosts process efficiency, underlining its significance in the DevOps environment. Testers should be responsible for creating and supporting automation right from the beginning, and should ideally strive to be self-reliant to result in desired DevOps benefits.

3)  Contribute to Innovation Through Empowerment

Giving your team the leverage to learn and experiment within their work hours helps them identify better work practices and enhance technical skillset. In that case, you as a leader must also take an initiative to help people innovate.

Create time during regular work hours, where employees can invest in themselves and improve the way they work. Also, instead of only rewarding persons per project, motivate the efforts of employees who learn new skills and leverage them to achieve process efficiency.

Change the Way You Work – Create a Sustainable Environment

A successful DevOps implementation moves beyond automating SDLC and demands a change in overall organizational structure, operating teams and work culture. It means having sufficient resources for each process and decreasing the dependency on enterprise IT teams for activities related to operations and security testing.

Testing teams impact the way features are deployed to production. Ensure to make them part of this cultural transformation.