Author | Mahipal Nehra
Translated by | Liu Yameng
Planning | Yan Garden
Software development companies have been adopting DevOps because it helps automate and simplify the development lifecycle of applications. Not only that, but DevOps improves the quality and speed of project delivery through planning, communication, processes, and tools that better coordinate development and operations teams. But what is the best strategy for testing DevOps? This article will discuss the basic concepts, lifecycle, best practices, and tools we should use for DevOps.
Software development companies have been adopting DevOps because it helps automate and simplify the development lifecycle of applications. Not only that, but DevOps improves the quality and speed of project delivery through planning, communication, processes, and tools that better coordinate development and operations teams.
As DevOps evolves, enterprises either use Agile + DevOps or opt only for devOps.
(Agile is an iterative process that focuses on collaboration, feedback, and rapid releases.) ）
But what is the best strategy for testing DevOps? To help, we'll discuss the basic concepts of DevOps, the lifecycle, best practices, and the tools we should use.
1
What is DevOps?
DevOps is a set of tools, cultural ideas, and practices that improve an organization's ability to deliver projects at high speed by automating and integrating processes between development and operations teams. DevOps emphasizes cross-team collaboration and communication, team delegation, and automation.
Under the Methodology of DevOps, development teams and operations teams are not isolated from each other. The two teams are typically combined into a single team, with the developer responsible for the entire lifecycle of the application, from development to deployment and operations. In addition, DevOps teams have a wide range of skills that are not limited to a single feature or feature of the application.
Sometimes, the security and quality assurance teams integrate with DevOps throughout the application development process. In this case, if the Focus of the DevOps team is on the security of the application, then it is also known as DevSecOps.
Unlike traditional manual practices, DevOps teams use technology stacks and tools to automate processes so that applications can be built automatically, reliably, and quickly. In addition, DevOps tools allow developers to independently perform tasks that require the assistance of other teams, such as configuring infrastructure or deploying code.
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DevOps lifecycle
The DevOps lifecycle is a series of automated processes in the continuous development lifecycle. The DevOps lifecycle takes an iterative approach, which is why practitioners symbolize it as an infinite loop. This infinite loop represents a continuous and collaborative strategy that includes technology stacks and tools at every stage of the application lifecycle.
The left side of the lifecycle handles application development and testing, while the right side describes the cycle of deployment and operations.
Let's take an overview of the DevOps lifecycle.
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From Agile to DevOps
Even if there are subtle differences between DevOps and agile testing, people who use Agile may find DevOps more familiar and eventually adopt it. While the principles of Agile have been successfully applied in development and iterations of QA, they have not been as successful in operations. That's where DevOps comes in.
DevOps has now replaced continuous integration with continuous development, in which teams develop applications in short cycles so that software can be automatically and reliably released at any time. Using CDs, you can develop, test, and publish software applications at a high frequency.
Because processes and environments in DevOps are standardized, continuous development processes benefit everyone in the entire chain. Because all processes in DevOps are automated, developers can focus on designing and coding high-quality applications rather than focusing on building, quality assurance, and operational processes.
Using continuous development can greatly reduce the time it takes to write and deploy code to a production environment, up to 4 hours.
In short, DevOps is an extension of agile, or what might be called "agility on steroids."
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Best practices for DevOps testing
DevOps test engineers need to rethink their software's QA testing strategy to accommodate the pipeline phase from development to operations. Thankfully, there are some DevOps testing best practices that can be understood and applied to the development of any application. Explaining each testing best practice for DevOps is beyond the scope of this article. So we've summarized every best practice for DevOps testing and explained below.
DevOps test culture
The testing culture of DevOps is different because cross-functional team members share the responsibility for delivering high-quality applications. Quality inspection is an important aspect of the pipeline phase and involves all team members. In addition, quality testing cannot be carried out by a completely different team at the end of the pipeline. As a result, teams need to determine a testing strategy to control the scope and amount of testing activity throughout the application development lifecycle.
In order to achieve the desired results, each member of the cross-functional team must be responsible for the tests and their results.
The DevOps testing culture should include the following characteristics:
Encourage collaboration around testing and analysis of test results, rather than testers and developers fighting over code fixes.
Testing coverage and creating entries requires the consent of the DevOps team.
Leaders should think of testing as a strategic part of project development, not as a cost reduction. They need the money and time budget to provide the DevOps team with testing training resources, frameworks, tools, management, and creation of evaluation strategies for the developers they want.
Development teams should be subject to test creation and results analysis, while operations teams should plan and execute cross-functional tests.
Continuous testing of strategies
The traditional waterfall testing approach, where a separate QA team tests a large number of changes in an application near the end of the development cycle, does not work with DevOps.
As DevOps teams test small changes at all stages of the continuous delivery pipeline, agile methods become more compatible with DevOps testing.
While Agile emphasizes the importance of continuous testing and the need to integrate continuous testing into software tools, it does not define ways to scale testing to deployment. DevOps requires a more explicit strategy for continuous testing than waterfall or agile. A continuous testing strategy must include integration testing for all phases of the pipeline and deployment.
End-to-end test integration
DevOps requires horizontal test integration across end-to-end pipeline stages, as well as vertical integration across different levels of continuous delivery infrastructure.
Here are some best practices for implementing end-to-end test integration:
Before integration, use private instances to test changes in your application to ensure that changes to your code do not break branches. Testing methods that do this include static code analysis, unit testing, performance testing, regression, scanning, and functional testing.
During the pre-integration testing phase, you should create automated tests to continue to be used in subsequent testing phases of your pipeline.
To validate the test results of the pre-integration tests, devOps teams should evaluate the code when it is submitted.
During the build phase, testing should be performed to determine whether the integrated build meets acceptance criteria.
To ensure that the performance and functionality of the build image meet the evaluation criteria, performance and functionality testing must be performed during code testing.
Similarly, in other phases such as regression, system testing, and delivery, a set of tests is required to ensure that the code and application meet the expected evaluation criteria.
DevOps test infrastructure
The application being tested can have a monolithic, three-tier, service-oriented, or microservices architecture. DevOps testing practices emphasize the importance of testing in a production-like environment, which ensures that once deployed to production, testing can cover all configurations of your application.
To this end, it is a best practice to find and include Infrastructure as Code (IAC), dynamic infrastructure configuration tools, cloud services, and test-as-a-service, which are more cost-effective and feasible than dedicated infrastructure, and that infrastructure configurations can be easily established and released as needed to run tests.
DevOps ready testing tools
Continuous delivery testing tools must provide the ability to test applications and provide the data needed to validate test results. Some of the tools you can use, such as functional testing tools, protocol testing tools, API testing tools, unit testing tools, database simulators, performance/load testing tools, and user interface testing tools, etc.
Test tools can be white box tools, gray box tools, and black box tools. Test tools should be able to mix test toolchains and frameworks for use with DevOps-ready tools.
This increases the elasticity of on-demand scaling vertically or horizontally, matches the needs of workloads, and the ability to test application changes through continuous delivery pipelines. DevOps-ready tools can be orchestrated, scaled, invoked, controlled, and monitored through APIs. Resources, fast-failing test design techniques, test framework configuration, and accelerated monitoring of test results and configuration of test tools.
Test analysis
If the analysis of ongoing test results does not keep up with the speed of testing, it not only increases the number of results to be analyzed, but also leads to a lack of time savings, a lot of confusion, and the neglect of valuable results, thereby slowing down the CI/CT cycle. Some of the techniques that you can use to match a test and its speed of analysis include a test results analyzer, a dashboard, or adding an analysis tool to a framework.
Microservices and containers
From a testing perspective, in a microservices architecture, you need to validate the contract between each service and the other services that use it. Dependencies between services and independence of microservices should both be well tested.
When running a service on a network, you also need to validate considerations such as reliability and performance. If a microservice is affected by application changes or related dependencies on microservice groups, you need to regression test it.
Containers provide the possibility of packaging test resources into special containers for convenience and immutability, as well as the scalability required to test changes.
Database DevOps testing
Throughout the process of continuous delivery, it is critical to develop a strategy to test and verify that any changes to the database or applications that use the database are performing as required. In addition, you must have tools that you can use to replicate data volumes from a production environment to ensure that you can test on production datasets before deployment.
DevOps security testing
By developing a DevOps security testing strategy, you can make it easier for your application to escape the impact of vulnerabilities, threats, and risks. DevOps teams can apply automated tools and tests throughout the development cycle to minimize downtime, vulnerabilities, and security threats.
Automated testing
To eliminate the risks associated with continuous integration, it is critical to add test automation that provides rapid feedback on application quality. Automated testing with CI allows teams to test new code iterations and minimizes the possibility of errors.
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DevOps testing tools
Using DevOps testing tools during the software development lifecycle provides several advantages for development and operations teams. Some of the benefits it provides include code quality improvements, fast and continuous feedback, and accelerated application time-to-market that helps increase development, operations, and test teams.
Below is a list of the different testing tools that you can use for DevOps testing strategies.
Unit testing tools
Through unit testing, DevOps teams can examine the source code of an application individually to verify its functionality. Unit testing can even be done during the initial development phase of an application. It relies on test cases that simulate the functionality of the application. These test cases either pass or fail, and provide the results to the user so that they can debug the code.
Some unit testing tools are specifically designed for a given programming language. The tools you can use are Mocha (for JavaScript), EMMA (for Java), Typemock (for .Net and C++), Parasoft (for C and C++), and SimpleTest (for PHP).
Performance testing tools
Performance testing is done in the later stages of DevOps, when writing and integrating code. Depending on the requirements of the project, the performance testing tool will test the application under pressure, load, capacity, volume, and recovery to check the performance of the application and how it recovers from anomalies.
The purpose of performance testing using tools is to detect crash sources and modify the system for maximum efficiency before releasing it to end users. Tools that can be used for performance testing are Apache JMeter, k6, Watir, Predator, and TestComplete.
Automated testing tools
Automated testing tools help automate testing, manage test data, and use test results to improve the quality of your software. In addition to reducing human error, automated testing tools can support scalable evaluation. The automation tools in the CI/CD model trigger tests based on events.
Tools that DevOps teams can use to automate testing are TestProject, Leapwork, Selenium, Tosca, and Testsigma.
Continuous testing tools
Continuous testing is the process of testing an application that facilitates code, functionality, and application validation at every stage of a DevOps pipeline to detect errors and minimize turnaround time.
Some examples of continuous testing tools used by DevOps teams include: AppVerify, Appium, Docker, Bamboo, and Jenkins.
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summary
DevOps is the ideal solution for developing applications for multiple businesses because it has good reason. However, the success and quality of the application depends entirely on the strategy developed by the DevOps team to test the application.
We hope this article has helped you develop a DevOps testing strategy for your current or future project.
https://www.decipherzone.com/blog-detail/devops-testing
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