Integrating DevOps practices in software development has revolutionized how teams collaborate and deliver products. It is all about deploying continuously, delivering new features faster, and encouraging teams to collaborate and work together more than ever. Despite many benefits, maintaining high-quality standards in the fast-paced DevOps environment poses unique challenges which we can overcome by establishing simple practices in the team.
Strategies for Success
When we think of DevOps culture, concepts like continuous integration, continuous delivery (CI/CD), and automation practices immediately come to mind. These principles have significantly transformed the software development lifecycle, making quality an integral part of every stage of the development process. Working in this way, quality assurance becomes everyone’s responsibility.
With this perspective in mind, here are some strategies we can implement to enhance our quality of delivery and product in the DevOps-driven environment:
- Shift-Left Testing: The idea behind shift-left testing is to start testing activities early in the development process to identify and address issues at their inception. In this way, we address problems earlier, reduce the cost of solving problems later, and maintain a higher-quality code base. Start with shift-left testing by implementing coding standards in the development team and by introducing test automation.
- Testing of IaC changes: Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a practice that brings consistency and organization to the IT infrastructure. Since the platforms that our products are using, and services that are running are changing and evolving rapidly, make sure to test all infrastructure changes in the test environment the same way you would test any other product changes.
- Penetration testing: Penetration (pen) testing is a cybersecurity practice to simulate cyber attacks on your system and identify vulnerabilities, weaknesses, and potential exploitation points. Implement pen testing practice on your product's staging environment through various available tools, and make sure to run it frequently. The outcomes of pen testing should be considered as risks, prioritized, and fixed according to the probability and impact.
- Monitoring and controlling: Implement continuous monitoring practices to observe and assess the quality of your software, environments, components, and processes. Start by observing the stability and consistency of your environments and keep track of defects and your KPIs to help you understand the quality of the delivery.
- Collaboration and Communication: Enhance the collaboration between development, operations, and QA teams. Clear communication channels and shared responsibilities enable QA members, but also the whole team to understand the context of changes and make informed testing decisions.
Conclusion
Quality in the DevOps culture is not only a phase within the development of new products but is a continuous commitment of the whole team to meet the highest quality standards. By implementing the strategies mentioned and making a quality main aspect of your DevOps journey, your team members will thrive in developing high-quality software and continuously deliver value to your stakeholders.