Best Practices & Tools for DevOps Testing Strategy. What is DevOps and It's lifecycle. Best Practices For DevOps Testing, DevOps Testing Tools.

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12
Apr
Best Practices & Tools for DevOps
Testing Strategy
 Mahipal Nehra
What are the Best Practices & Tools for DevOps Testing Strategy? Software development
companies have been adopting DevOps since it helps automate and streamline their
application development life cycle. Not just that, but, DevOps also improves the quality and
speed of the project deliveries by making the coordination between development and
operations teams better through planning, communication, processes and tools.
Since the evolution of DevOps, businesses are either using Agile+DevOps or just opting for
DevOps methodologies.
(Agile is an iterative process focused on collabs, feedback and rapid releases.)
But what’s the best strategy for testing DevOps? To help you out, we will discuss the basic
concept of DevOps, its lifecycle, best practices and tools that you should go for.
What is DevOps?
DevOps is the set of tools, cultural philosophies, and practices that improves the ability of an
organization to deliver projects at high velocity by automating and integrating processes
between development and operation teams. DevOps accentuates cross-team collaboration &
communication, team empowerment, and automation.
Under a DevOps methodology, the development team and operations team are not isolated
from each other. These two teams are often merged as one team where developers work on
the app’s lifecycle from development to deployment and operations. Besides, the DevOps
team has a wide range of skills that isn’t limited to one function or feature of the application.
Read: What does DevOps actually do
Sometimes, the security and quality assurance teams get integrated with DevOps throughout
the application development. In this case, where the focus of the DevOps team is on the
security of the application, it is also referred to as DevSecOps.
Unlike traditional manual practices, the DevOps team uses a technology stack and tooling
that automates the process to build applications reliably and quickly. In addition, DevOps
tools allow developers to carry out tasks such as provisioning infrastructure or deploying
code independently, which would have otherwise required assistance from other teams.
DevOps Lifecycle
DevOps lifecycle is an automated processes series within a continuous development lifecycle.
DevOps lifecycle works on an iterative approach that’s the reason practitioners have
symbolized it as an infinity loop. This infinity loop represents the continuous and
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2. collaborative strategy that includes technology stacks and tools for every stage in the lifecycle
of an application.
The left part of the lifecycle deals with the application development and testing while the
right side depicts the cycle of deployment and operations.
Let’s get an overview of the working DevOps lifecycle.
Plans: The DevOps team identifies business needs and gathers feedback from users
during the planning phase. To maximize the value to the business and provide the desired
result, developers also create a roadmap of the project at this stage.
Code: In this stage, the application code is created and the process is streamlined by
using tools and plugins like Git or GitHub to minimize lousy coding practices and
shortcomings in application security.
Build: In the build stage, developers commit the code to the shared repository with tools
like Gradle or Maven.
Test: In the test phase, the build is deployed to the test environment so that the
application quality can be ensured by running different tests such as security, user
acceptance, integration, performance, and more using tools like Selenium, JUnit, etc.
Release: When the build is ready to be deployed in the production environment after
passing tests, releases are scheduled by the operations team.
Deploy: In the deployment stage, Infrastructure-as-Code uses different tools to build and
deploy the production environment.
Operate: Once the release is accessible to the end-users, the operations team works on
server configuring and provisioning using tools like Ansible, Saltstack, CFEngine, or Chef.
Monitor: As the name suggests, in the monitoring stage, the DevOps pipeline is
monitored according to the collected information on application performance, user
behavior, and so forth. With environment monitoring, teams can easily identify
bottlenecks that affect productivity.
From Agile to DevOps
Even with subtle differences between DevOps and Agile testing, individuals working with
Agile might find DevOps more familiar and eventually adopt it. Although the principles of
Agile are successfully applied in the iterations of development and QA, it is not as successful
on the operations side. This is where DevOps comes in.
DevOps has now replaced Continuous Integration with Continuous Development, in which
teams work to develop applications in short cycles so the software can be automatically and
reliably released anytime. Using CD, the software application can be developed, tested, and
released at a great frequency.
As processes and environments are standardized in DevOps, the continuous development
process benefits everyone in the entire chain. As all the processes in DevOps are automated,
it allows developers to focus on designing and coding a high-quality application instead of
stressing about builds, quality assurance, and operations processes.
Read: Salesforce DevOps benefits and challenges
Using continuous development dramatically reduces the duration between the time code is
written and committed to deployment on production for users up to 4 hours.
In short, DevOps is an Agile extension or can be called "Agile on Steroids."

3. Best Practices For DevOps Testing
DevOps test engineers need to re-think software QA test strategies to align with pipeline
stages from development to operations. Thankfully, several DevOps testing best practices
can be understood and used for any application development. Although it is beyond the
scope of this article to explain each of the test best practices of DevOps. That’s why we have
summarized every best practice of DevOps testing and explained them below.
1. DevOps Test Culture
The testing culture of DevOps differs as the responsibility of providing high-quality
applications is shared between cross-functional team members. The quality check is a crucial
aspect of the pipeline phases and involves all the team members. Besides, quality testing
cannot be left for the end of the pipeline by a completely different team. So, teams need to
determine the test strategies to control the extent and volume of testing activities throughout
the application development lifecycle.
Read: Running Stateful Applications on Kubernetes - Best Practices & Use Cases
To achieve the required results, each member of the cross-functional team has to take the
responsibility for testing and its results.
DevOps Test Culture should include the following characteristics:
Encouragement of collaboration around testing and test results analysis instead of
confrontations between testers and developers for code repairs.
Test coverage and creation terms have been consented to by the DevOps team.
Leaders should consider testing as a strategic part of the project development instead of
seeing it as a cost that can be reduced. They need to budget money and time to provide
test training resources, frameworks, tools, management and creating assessment
policies for developers they want in the DevOps team.
Dev teams should embrace the test creation and result analysis, while the Ops teams
should plan and execute cross-functional tests.
2. Continuous Test Strategies
The traditional waterfall approach for testing where an extensive volume of changes in the
application is tested near the end of the development cycle by an independent QA team
cannot work with DevOps.
As the DevOps team tests small changes over all the stages of the continuous delivery
pipeline, agile methodologies are more compatible with DevOps testing.
Read: What is Custom Software Development
While Agile emphasizes the importance of continuous testing and the need to integrate
continuous testing into software tools, it does not define the methods for extending tests to
deployment. The continuous testing strategies required for DevOps are more defined than
those for waterfall or Agile. Continuous testing strategies must include the integration of
testing in all the phases of the pipeline and deployment.
3. End-to-End Test Integration
DevOps requires horizontal integration of tests across end-to-end pipeline stages as well as
vertical integration across different levels of continuous delivery infrastructure.
The best practices to achieve end-to-end test integration are enlisted below:
Conducting tests on the changes in the application before integration using a private
instance to ensure the code changes do not break the branch. Some of the testing methods
to do so are static code analysis, unit testing, performance testing, regression, scanning
and functional testing.
In the pre-integration testing stage, automated tests should be created for use in later
testing stages in the pipeline.
To verify test results from the pre-integration test, the DevOps team should conduct
assessments on the code at the time of committing code.
In the build stage, tests should be performed to identify whether the integrated build
meets the acceptance criteria.
To make sure that the performance and functionality of the build images meet the
assessment criteria, performance and functional tests must be committed during the code
testing process.

4. Similarly, at other stages such as regression, system tests, and delivery, a set of tests needs
to be conducted to ensure that the code and application meet the expected assessment
criteria.
4. DevOps Test Infrastructures
The application that is being tested can have either monolithic, 3-tier, service-oriented or
microservices architecture. DevOps testing practices emphasize the importance of
conducting tests in a production-like environment which assures that the test can cover all
the configurations of the application once deployed to production.
For that, a best practice is to find and include infrastructure-as-code, dynamic infrastructure
configuration tools, cloud services, and test-as-a-service that are more cost-efficient and
feasible than dedicated infrastructures and easily stand up and release infrastructure
configurations as required to run tests.
5. DevOps-Ready Test Tools
The continuous delivery test tools must offer capabilities to operate tests on the applications
and provide data from the results required to set the test verdict. Some of the tools you can
use are functional test tools, protocol test tools, API test tools, unit test tools, database
simulators, performance/load test tools, and user interface test tools.
Test tools may be white box tools, gray box tools and black box tools. Test tools should be
able to blend the test toolchain and framework to be DevOps-ready.
This will increase the elasticity of scale on-demand vertically or horizontally, and match the
workload demands as well as the capacity of testing changes in application going through the
continuous delivery pipeline. DevOps ready tools can be orchestrated, scaled, invoked,
controlled, and monitored from an API. Resources, employing fail-fast test design
techniques, test framework configurations that accelerate test results monitoring, and test
tool configurations.
6. Test Analytics
If the analysis of the results from continuous testing does not get kept up with the speed of
testing, it can not only increase the number of results to be analyzed but also lead to no time
savings, mass confusion and overlooked valuable results that will slow the CI/CT cycles.
Some techniques that can be used to match the speed of the test and its analysis include test
result analysers, dashboards or adding analysis tools to the frameworks.
7. Microservices and Containers
From the testing perspective, with microservices architecture comes the need to verify each
service contract with other services using it. Both inter-service dependencies and the
independence of microservices should be well tested.
It is also necessary to verify the reliability and performance considerations when operating
services over a network. Microservices need to be regression tested if they were affected by
application changes or a dependent microservices group.
Containers provide the possibility of packaging test resources in special containers for
convenience and immutability, as well as scalability on demand for testing changes.
8. Database DevOps Testing
It is crucial to have a strategy to test and verify any changes to the database or application
using a database are performing as required throughout the pipeline of continuous delivery.
Additionally, there must be tools that can be used to replicate data volumes from the
production to ensure that the tests are conducted on the production like datasets before
deployment.
9. DevOps Security Testing
By strategizing DevOps Security testing, it becomes easier to make the application free from
vulnerabilities, threats and risks. DevOps team can apply automated tools and tests in the
development cycle to minimize downtime, vulnerabilities and security threats.
10. Automate Tests
To eliminate the risks that come with continuous integration, it is essential to add test
automation that will provide quick application quality feedback. Indulging automation
testing with CI allows teams to test iterations of new code and minimize the possibility of
errors.
DevOps Testing Tools

5. What are the best tools for DevOps Testing Strategy? Here is the list of different testing tools
that can be used for the DevOps testing strategy.
Using DevOps testing tools in the software development life cycle offers several advantages
to the development and operations team. Some of the benefits it offers are code quality
improvement, fast and continuous feedback, and increased application time-to-market that
helps in increasing development, operations and testing teams.
Unit Testing Tools
With unit testing, the DevOps team can examine the source code of the application
individually to verify its functionality. Unit testing can be done even at the initial
development stage of the application. It relies on test cases that imitate the functionality of
the application. These test cases either pass or fail and provide results to the user so that they
can debug the code.
Some unit testing tools are specifically designed for a given programming language. A few
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 at the later stages of DevOps, i.e when the code is written and
integrated. According to the requirements of the project, performance testing tools will
subject the application to stress, load, capacity, volume and recovery tests to check the
performance of the application and how it recovers from an outrage.
The aim of using tools for performance testing is to detect the crash source and modify the
system for peak efficiency before releasing it to end-users. A few tools that can be used for
performance testing are Apache JMeter, k6, Watir, Predator, and TestComplete.
Automated Testing Tools
Automated testing tools help to run tests automatically, manage test data and use the result
to improve the quality of the software. Apart from reducing human errors, automated testing
tools also enable scaled evaluations. Automated tools in the CI/CD model trigger tests based
on events.
Some of the tools that the DevOps team can use for automated testing are TestProject,
Leapwork, Opkey, Selenium, Tosca, and Testsigma.
Continuous Testing Tools
Continuous testing is the process of testing applications that helps in code, feature and
application validation at every phase of the DevOps pipeline to detect bugs and minimize the
turnaround time.
A few examples of continuous testing tools that are used by the DevOps team include
AppVerify, Appium, Docker, Bamboo, and Jenkins.
Conclusion
DevOps is the ideal solution for the development of applications for several businesses
because of all the right reasons. However, the success and quality of the application
completely depend on the strategy the DevOps team made for testing the application.
We hope that this article has helped you out in strategizing DevOps testing for your current
or future projects.

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Posted by Mahipal Nehra | Posted at 12 Apr, 2022 Web
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