Autonomous Testing’s Role in Agile DevOps

DevOps testing, as an Agile methodology, is key to delivering testing and integration on a continuous basis, including continuous feedback, to enable better collaboration and quality.

  

For too long, testing has progressed by small incremental steps, creating a quality assurance (QA) winter. We think it’s time for a revolution, so we have written and published our manifesto for change. It’s a future where an intelligent test agent handles all testing needs so organizations’ resources are freed up, thus saving them time and driving revenue. This future means intelligent testing is a function everyone on a given team can contribute to—and, above all, allows for quality to be embedded in everything an organization produces.

 

How do we get there? Apply these perspectives and view testing strategically:

 

Testing Shouldn’t Be an Afterthought

 

QA should be a C-suite responsibility. No one laughs at the idea of a chief compliance officer, so maybe you should consider appointing a chief quality officer. Successful companies are the ones that adopt the mantra of test early, test often and test in depth. This means testing becomes a key strategic requirement in your organization. If testing needs more resources, make them available. If there is tension between your test and dev teams, try merging them. If you want to release new features frequently, look into continuous testing.

 

Testing Must Be Cloud-First

 

Up until now, testing has been done in-house using old servers, begged resources and outdated infrastructure. We believe testing should be run in the cloud, allowing you to leverage an almost infinite resource pool. Testing done like this will be faster, more efficient and cheaper.

 

Testing should not be the poor man of the software development process. Companies that engage with their testers produce the best and most reliable software. Those that treat testing as an afterthought risk bugs, production delays and, ultimately, their reputations.

 

Agile DevOps Requires Autonomous Testing

 

DevOps has become critical to the success of many companies. Without DevOps, many of the services end users take for granted would simply fall over. Social media sites and apps such as Facebook and LinkedIn would fail if they constantly went offline. If content delivery services such as SoundCloud, Netflix and Hulu kept dying mid-track, you’d soon cancel your subscription. People also expect messaging services to be 100% reliable.

 

DevOps straddles the border between developing software and running it in production. It is what you get when you apply the Agile approach to software development to deploying services in production.

 

Autonomous testing is the outcome of intelligent test automation. With autonomous testing, you now have an intelligent test agent (ITA) augmenting the work of your test and DevOps teams. This ITA is like the perfect regression tester—focused, tireless and driven, but still intelligent. Using this ITA means changes can be tested and deployed completely automatically. Without this, the job of an agile DevOps engineer would be infinitely more difficult.

 

Intelligent Automation Just Works

 

Classic test automation is dumb, and like all dumb systems, its growth and utility are limited. In this era of AI, test automation should be intelligent, too. There are few areas of software development where it is easier to apply AI—and even fewer where the rewards are so obvious and immediate.

 

Put simply, well-designed, intelligent automation just works. Intelligent automation means tests become less brittle, so no more time wasted on unnecessary maintenance. Productivity increases because test failures are automatically diagnosed and classified. New tests become easier to create and test flows are easy to reuse.