In a world where organizations are moving towards a faster and more continuous delivery, it is essential that the quality of the products remains a priority. Quality is a crucial part of the development cycle, as the product should always provide the best user experience to the customer. Good quality products mean customer satisfaction; and this is the goal of any business.
One way to having a fast delivery all the while keeping a good quality is through the emerging practice of QAOps.
What is QAOps?
QAOps is a combination of Quality Assurance (QA) and software operations. QAOps aims to achieve high-quality software by using a DevOps approach. This framework was created to enhance software delivery processes and workflows while keeping the quality of a product. Thus, QAOps combines QA practices with software development and IT operations to develop a long-term, integrated operational delivery model.
Contrary to traditional QA and Testing, QAOps integrates QA all throughout the development lifecycle, allowing QA teams to play a major part in the process. That way, QA teams are able to analyze better the development cycles as well as discover issues earlier on, and, at the end of the day, accelerating the operations and delivering better quality to customers. Hence, QA teams and development teams must work together to ensure that software testing is a part of the Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline.
The benefits of QAOps
Despite being new, QAOps is slowly gaining popularity as DevOps is becoming more used among businesses. With QAOps, QA is proving its place within the development lifecycle, and showing its importance among the development team.
One of the reasons why organizations should start adopting QAOps is for quality. With an increase in QA activities within the delivery pipeline, the developed products are more likely to be of high-quality than when using a traditional methodology. Thus, with QAOps, companies can remain ahead of the competition.
In a CI/CD pipeline, continuous testing is done through the use of automation making the development cycle faster. With QAOps, the process is sped up and give more efficient results, which then has a positive impact on the business’s revenue.
Moreover, QAOps boost teamwork and productivity. QA teams are fully involved in the process and the delivery pipeline, resulting in good collaboration with other teams as well as a better understanding of the requirements. Hence, QA teams are gaining more value in the organization, which can only lead to better productivity and efficiency.
Including QA in development and operations
In order to achieve fast delivery and high quality, it is vital that all QA activities are implemented in the CI/CD pipeline. The best way to integrate QA in development and operations is for developers to start by writing test cases while operation engineers and product designers work on detecting UX/UI issues alongside the QA team.
By doing so, the QA and developer teams work together and gain a better understanding of the QA process. This collaboration will then help to make the process of development and testing more efficient.
Conclusion
Although it is quite new, QAOps is an emerging trend that allows the automation of processes between software development, IT, and QA in order to deliver software faster and with better quality. QAOps brings to attention the fact that quality should be a vital part of the development lifecycle and that QA and development teams should unite to create the best product for consumers. Quality assurance and test engineers are essential for a successful delivery model.
QAOps will play an important role in the future of software testing where the speed of delivery doesn’t impact negatively the quality of software.
