Testing in Devops: Concepts, Best Practices & More

DevOps empowers smooth collaboration and communication between development and operations teams in today’s competitive software development environments.

In DevOps, the two teams work together, sharing responsibilities towards achieving their primary goal: frequent and faster delivery of high-quality software that satisfies evolving customer needs. DevOps practices, along with relevant tools and technologies, drive organizations to accomplish tasks as efficiently as possible.

Some DevOps practices like Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) support frequent software releases. That means that testing plays an integral part in helping to maintain software quality at each step of the development lifecycle.

(This article is part of our DevOps Guide. Use the right-hand menu to go deeper into individual practices and concepts.)

How traditional testing worked

Software testing is not a new concept. But testing in traditional environment looks very different from testing in a DevOps environment.

In the days of the traditional waterfall methodology, software testing looked like this:

• Spanned only one phase of the life cycle
• Started after the software was developed completely
• Was a manual process that was highly error-prone and took a long time to complete

A huge difference is that software testers sat on a separate team, isolated from the development team. If any bug was detected at the testing stage, it was challenging and costly to go back and do that change. The reason for that was structural: the particular error scenarios were to be well-identified at the beginning.

Under these circumstances, it was difficult to maintain the required standard and quality within the expected timeline.

Features of testing in a DevOps environment

Software testing evolved considerably over the years after Agile started its ascent. Since then, faster and collaborative testing strategies, tools, and technologies have been introduced to the testing sphere.

This is what testing in a DevOps environment looks like:

• Testing is a continuous and automated process that enables continuous and faster delivery of software.
• Testing spans every stage of the software development lifecycle (SDLC).
• Each step of the SDLC involves different forms of testing. This minimizes backtracking in the case that you’ve detected an error.
• Testing is no longer the responsibility of one particular team. Shared testing responsibilities allow everyone to understand the impacts behind each change.

(Learn how to set up your own CI/CD pipeline.)

DevOps adopts Shift Left Testing Approach

Importantly, DevOps culture adopts the Shift Left testing approach, which contrasts with traditional environments where testing happens at the end of the development.

Shift Left testing pushes the testing to the left, the earlier steps, of the software development process. There, testing is also started when the development is started. This approach helps to identify bugs as early as possible.

These inherent features of a DevOps testing environment contribute significantly towards improving software quality. Still, the success or failure of the testing strategy depends on how well organizations implement DevOps best practices for testing.