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Significance of QAOps Development

Significance of QAOps Development

23 August 2022

Quality is a critical parameter that determines the success of an application. Organizations have been including different developmental and testing approaches in order to improve application quality. Like DevOps, which was introduced to speed up delivery, QAOps is introduced to improve the quality across the DevOps pipeline. As the name suggests, QAOps is the combination of QA process and operations to deliver high-quality applications.

Software development happens in iterations; any errors identified across the process further undergo many iterations until all of them are fixed. This process involves cross-functional teams with different skills working towards achieving a common goal – quality at speed. To support organizations accelerate their ‘quality’ goals quickly, ‘QAOps’ was introduced in the industry. Let us understand how QAOps work, how to implement it, and the benefits it offers.

How to implement QAOps?

QAOps is implemented to ease the complex QA process of software development lifecycle and deliver quality for improved customer experience. As it combines operations and QA, it is sure to streamline and improve business practices and outcomes.

There are different approaches involved in implementing QAOps, some of them include:

Automated testing: Automating testing is one of the critical processes of QAOps. With the complex processes involved like continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous testing, manual testing will do no justice. Test automation will ease and speed up the process, yielding accurate results. Hence, automating the testing process should be the primary consideration while implementing QAOps.

Parallel testing: QAOps uses parallel testing to speed up the testing process. Here, the application is tested across different environments like simulators, browsers, emulators, real devices etc., to evaluate its performance. This approach reduces time significantly and enables faster testing.

Regression testing: QAOps evaluates the quality of the application by making constant changes to the code. Hence, frequent regressions should be carried out to test if the code changes are causing deviation from the expected results.

Smoke testingSmoke testing should be implemented as a part of QAOps process to check for the application’s stability. As code changes are an unavoidable part of QAOps, smoke tests are run to check if these changes are not causing any issues with the application’s stability.

Scalability testing: Scalability testing is performed to test if the application can scale up or down with increase and decrease in the number of users. It is important to implement scalability testing as a part of QAOps to check the application’s behavior in real scenario.

Benefits of QAOps

QAOps is the latest trend in the software testing industry to improve the quality of the developed software. There are plenty of reasons to implement QAOps, some of the popular once are:

  • QAOps creates applications of higher quality
  • It streamlines the process by improving team coordination, in turn, provides better results
  • It significantly reduces turnaround time, without affecting the quality
  • Promotes better team collaboration
  • Works along CI/CD pipeline and identifies errors in the earlier stages of SDLC
  • Offers better project transparency
  • Reduces pressure on delivery team
  • Reduces deployment risks
  • Reduces cost of the project
  • Offers better understanding of the development and operation teams, thereby helping in quicker identification and fixing of bugs
  • Aims at offering seamless user experience

What are the challenges associated with implementing QAOps?

Though QAOps comes with varied benefits, it also has some challenges associated with it. One should overcome the challenges to yield maximum benefits of QAOps.

Some of the challenges are:

Finding the right resources is tedious: QAOps involves combination of QA and Operations teams, hence, to hire the right resource who can carry out testing as well as understand and work with unison with the operation team is difficult. Further, the testing trends are constantly changing, demanding organizations to out skill their existing workforce.

Changing requirements: Testing across CI/CD pipeline are subjected to constant changes which leads to changes in requirements of the deliverables. Addressing the scenario of changing requirements is one of the challenges associated with implementing QAOps.

It is an expensive process: Implementing QAOps will require the organizations to invest in the right resources, tools, and restructure the existing process. This whole requirement will need a good investment making QAOps an expensive process.

Keeping up with the trend is difficult: In the ever-evolving technological world, staying updated to every new trend in the market is difficult. Lack of guidance with respect to the new trends increases the probability of process failure.

Steps involved in QAOps

The primary reason for implementing QAOps is to improve the software quality. It is carried out across the CI/CD pipeline to ensure complete evaluation of code, testing data, and checking for the working of any changes incorporated.

In order to implement QAOps the right way, the following steps should be followed.

Setting up the process

The process should be set up by building the right tests when the application is integrated across the CI/CD pipeline. Once the tests are built, it is mapped and executed to test codes and deployment.

Execute

Once the tests are set up, it should be executed. The execution step involves parallel testing to ensure that the application gives the desired results across different test environment.

Report and Analyze

After the successful execution of the tests, it should be recorded and analyzed to check if it is giving the expected results.

When the above steps are carried out efficiently, the results of QAOps are amplified; it reduces time and cost, while increasing the quality.

Conclusion

QAOps is going to be the future of the quality improvement process. Implementing QAOps will allow organizations to stay ahead of their competitors. Organizations are already preparing to implement QAOps as a part of their QA process as it accelerates faster software delivery, improves quality, and offers a seamless user experience. Hence, organizations are actively shifting to QAOps practice despite some of the challenges, as its benefits outweigh the challenges.



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