Top 5 DevOps and testing videos to binge watch

Software testers have often been undervalued and handed iffy code with little time to test properly up against looming releases. With the shift-left approach becoming a given, the tide has changed, and the DevOps revolution wave is only getting bigger. Testers are finally being perceived as value creators, and quality testing is being woven strategically into release cycles.

How exactly? In these Tricentis Virtual Summit videos, tech giants Microsoft and Dell walk us through their DevOps transformations. Tricentis gives us a demonstration of AI-powered testing, and offers a lens into future transformative tools. The speakers are refreshingly human and openly transparent about their challenges, with some intriguing analogies (diving, cycling, magic carpets…) along the way.

See more talks like this at the next Tricentis Virtual Summit, on April 13 – 15, 2021.

Quality in a cloud DevOps with Microsoft

Abel Wang, Principal Cloud Advocate and DevOps Lead, guides us from when Microsoft underwent a huge DevOps shift in 2010, to the cloud where they innovate today. They switched from releasing new software versions from every 3 years to every 3 weeks, where “like clockwork, new code just magically shows up in Azure DevOps services, and customers magically get it.”

This magic has not been without mayhem, and Abel does not gloss over the highly disruptive transition. Developers and testers had to be upskilled, and quality became everyone’s responsibility, building it into application as it’s coded. It was vital to scrap end-to-end functional testing for unit testing, and extensive code reviews are now a given.

It’s evident that Microsoft’s huge upheaval to the cloud was worth it; we’re reminded that teams that adopt DevOps best practices have a 4-5x higher revenue growth. Listen up and watch Abel’s compelling talk.

A shallow talk on deep testing

Michael Bolton, founder at DevelopSense, piques your interest from the offset with the question “how well have you done testing?” We’re asked to brainstorm a list of words that come before testing, and very few (if any) indicating quality spring to mind. In a bid to switch the status quo, Michael walks us through the valuable concepts of shallow and deep testing.

Michael runs us through the logic of when to apply each, based on your particular DevOps use case. Deep testing is a real investment of time where “we endeavor to find the subtle, the hidden, the challenging, the complex, the intermittent, and the emergent bugs.” But is that always necessary? Shallow testing has its place too and has every chance of catching bugs.

Weigh up shallow vs. deep testing with Michael’s talk.

Vision AI: the 3rd era of test automation

AI has entered the testing world with an indisputable bang. Gerta Sheganaku, Product Engagement Manager at Tricentis, eases us into this new wave of test automation with the comfort that AI is not here to replace us, but assist us. We learn that Vision AI combines AI and machine-learning to visualize and drive any UI like testers do, leaving room for the fun bits of testing.

We’re assured that Vision AI “empowers the tester to create more tests, to achieve better coverage, deliver greater value, and gets rid of those coding issues and maintaining frameworks. The tester is finally freed!”

From incorporating self-healing to overcome the testing fragility, to making it technically easier by removing the need to operate at code level, Vision AI looks to be the ideal emancipator.

See Vision AI in action in this eye-opening talk.

Dell ISG’s path to DevOps with “Continuous X”

When Dell took on rolling out their DevOps approach, scaling across 50+ products and 10,000+ staff wasn’t going to be straight forward. Adam Arakelian, Director of Software Engineering at Dell, shares how they succeeded by adopting a shared mentality vs. applying specific methodology.

With this philosophy-first culture driven by goals and values, Adam describes exactly how Dell went on to realize said goals in a customized CI/CD/CT platform. All stakeholders both consume and build on this architecture as requirements change: “From a continuous X perspective, we are always driving to improve how we look at our continuous integration or our continuous delivery. That’s one of the main mantras that helped us drive this adoption forward.” Adam explains how Tricentis qTest has been instrumental from Dell’s continuous testing practice, by facilitating a single architectural workflow.

This talk is brimming full of practical advice to help you put your DevOps plan into action.

The future of testing tooling

Last but not least, dare to dream with Grigori Melnik, CPO at Tricentis, and James Bach, Tricentis Technical Fellow. This talk covers how Tricentis aspire the meet the needs and desires of business leaders and testers alike, in a testing world without the shackles of drudgery and underappreciation.

A self-proclaimed critic, nothing gets past James Bach, so you can bet that his integrated testing environment wish list has been evaluated extensively. He demands that “our system needs to have the ability to take any kind of data, and then allow us to evolve that data into specific kinds of structures.” Progressive formulization and journaling are a couple of the enticing features James explores.

The ITE is just part of future at Tricentis – expect this to be powered by cloud-native testing services, available in a marketplace where testers can both list and transact extensions.

See what’s on the horizon for Tricentis and the testing community.

If you like what you hear and want to learn more, sign up for the Tricentis Virtual Summit.