Improve quality in DevOps pipelines by improving your approach to testing

When talking with our customers, we’ve noticed a recurring misconception about the relationship between DevOps and testing. As testing and development teams begin preparing for a transition to DevOps, they aren’t quite sure how Agile test management fits into the pipeline, or they are concerned that a centralized Agile testing approach won’t work with the DevOps model.

As a result, instead of embedding quality across the entire DevOps pipeline, testing gets broken up and done at different points during the delivery process, often by different individuals using different tools. That means that team members end up losing visibility, and the testing strategy becomes disjointed. For a delivery method defined by its collaborative culture, allowing testing to drift into silos is counterintuitive – and counterproductive to the project’s success.

In a recent survey conducted by Techwell, 87% of respondents who successfully completed DevOps transformation said that prioritizing testing was extremely important to their transformation. What that tells us is that the most successful teams are the ones who align testing strategies with the DevOps initiative, focusing on things like increasing visibility, collaboration, and integration across the pipeline – and actively working to prevent this kind of fragmentation.

Tricentis Product Marketing Manager Alex Drag says this view of testing is a lot like Cher’s infamous Monet metaphor in the movie “Clueless.” To paraphrase: From far away, it’s o.k., but up close, it’s a mess.

You may be doing continuous testing successfully and still find yourself here. The difference is often as simple as clearly defined testing strategies and objectives. If your team has fallen into a pattern of disjointed testing, you may find that you have a hard time understanding code quality, tracking test automation progress, and assessing release readiness. For Drag, the bottom line is this: To meet your enterprise’s goals of delivering high quality software rapidly, continuous testing must exist across your entire DevOps pipeline, and be driven by a centralized, integrated approach that actively promotes collaboration and visibility to both upstream and downstream stakeholders.