1. DevOps
The Nirvana in Software Engineering
A perspective on Quality
Engineering
www.cigniti.com | Unsolicited Distribution is Restricted. Copyright © 2015 - 16, Cigniti Technologies

2. www.cigniti.com | Unsolicited Distribution is Restricted. Copyright © 2015 - 16, Cigniti Technologies
DevOps - The Nirvana in Software Engineering
Executive Summary
The CXOs today are under immense pressure to deliver value to
their customers - at lightening speed. The speed of delivery
depends heavily on delivery by Development and Operations - two
groups critical to the success of any modern enterprise. The third
group evolving as the most critical in Business Assurance is the
Quality Assurance Group.
If the demand of the hour is rapid deployments, the need of the
hour is Quality Engineering starting early within the Development
lifecycle and stretching late into Post–Production.
Traditionally CXOs rely heavily on Innovation within their Software
Engineering groups for Agility and quicker time to market. Agile, or
the various flavors thereof, are a fine example. On the other hand,
the Infrastructure groups have assured CXOs of a scalable capacity
and sustained performance through innovations of their own. A fine
example of this is Virtualization in its various forms.
Even through the evolution / innovation of both the groups, the
execution gap in development and delivery at a high pace is evident.
This lapse can be attributed to delays in QA, Release / Deployment
Management, and Environment availability.
DevOps is an essential link in an Enterprise’s Engineering armour to
ensure continuous delivery with agility to respond to customer
feedback.
What DevOps is Not
DevOps is not only a tool, culture, or
a fancy title.
What is it then?
DevOps is an Ecosystem driven by
Quality as the primary focus. An
Ecosystem where System Architects,
Development Teams, Infrastructure
Teams, and Quality Assurance Teams
are one big happy Family.
DevOps is a natural extension to
ensuring Continuous Deployments
and Delivery, thus ensuring a better
go to market.
DevOps is the next logical step if you
aspire to elevate Quality Assurance
to be Quality Engineering.
DevOps is the Nirvana in Quality
Engineering

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Test Automation Center of Excellence (TA - CoE)
DevOps Implementation Approach for Enterprises
Agile principles with lean implementation practices across the delivery
stream are the pre-requisite of an Enterprise organization aspiring to
adopt DevOps. The lean principles are to be extended across the
software / application supply value chain. Implementation of DevOps
dramatically drives up the efficiency and productivity across the lifecycle
through increased automation on all fronts (Development, Build,
Testing, Deployment, Release, Infrastructure / Environment), accelerated
feedback from customers, and significant reduction in rework / manual
overheads.
The approach to be adopted includes:
1. Continuous Planning / Agility
2. Collaborative Development
3. Continuous Testing
4. Continuous Deployment and Release
5. Operations Readiness Testing (Blue / Green
Deployments)
6. Continuous Feedback
7. Feedback loop into Dev / QA cycles
The Role of QA
As Enterprises aspire towards
DevOps, the role of QA teams in
Quality Engineering becomes vital.
QA teams ought to graduate towards
Quality Engineering & that becomes
possible through close collaboration.
The collaboration has to be driven by
QA teams and will be made possible
by taking an Engineering approach.
The conventional tester role has to
be replaced by Software Development
Engineers in Test. This ensures
collaboration at the start of the cycle,
a more test driven development
approach upstream, automation of
deployment, & release downstream.
The role of QA teams in the ensuring
continuous delivery includes:
• Requirements / User Stories
• Unit Test Automation
• Test Driven Development
• Functional Automation
• Build Automation
• Continuous Integration
• Deployment Automation
• Release Automation
• Operations Readiness Testing
• Post Production Monitoring
• Continuous Feedback
It is imperative for the QA teams to
gear up for the challenge and
support sustained innovation which
is the need of the hour.
Business
Planning
Test Strategy
and Plan
Requirements
Review& Report
Source Code Review
& Test Case Design
Functional, Automation,
Performance & Security
CI Framework
Design& Unit Test
Automated Configuration
Management
CI Regression
Testing and UAT
Production Support
and Maintenance
Requirements
Management
Development Build & CI
Deployment in
Production
Pre-production
Deployment
Release and
Change control
Testing

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Test Automation Center of Excellence (TA - CoE)
DevOps - Critical Success Factors
Leadership Alignment: Development teams are measured on
their ability to steer course rapidly & adapt to dynamic business
needs - a.k.a Agility. Operations teams are often rated on their
ability to ensure maximum uptime (Availability), more than
required capacity (Scalability), and Stability. If both teams are
managed separately, competing goals may lead to conflict of
interest.
Automation: Start early - Unit test automation, Test Driven /
Iterative Development and Continuous Integration to ensure
continuous deployment and continuous delivery
Identify low hanging fruit: Automate repeatable tasks,
eliminate wait times caused by manual processes & delays,
eliminate tasks in the lifecycle not directly contributing to
insights on customer needs
Infrastructure / Environment: Automated environment
management including deployment / release automation & ORT
Post Production: Production Synthesizers, Real User Monitoring
& Synthetic Monitoring to understand the production behavior
patterns and feedback into Dev / QA cycles
The Cigniti Advantage
Cigniti DevOps practice brings a comprehensive strategy and several
value additions including:
1. DevOps Acceleration Kit (Preparation and readiness Toolkit)
2. Continuous Integration Automation Framework
3. End to End DevOps Framework
4. Tool and Vendor Alliances
About the Author
Prasanna S Singaraju
Practice Head DevOps & Emerging
Solutions, North America
Prasanna, Head of Solutions, Strategy,
and Pre-sales at Cigniti, is responsible
for leading strategic initiatives that
focus on identifying and developing
new options to increase corporate
enterprise value. His primary focus at
Cigniti is defining strategy for emerging
technologies and trends in Quality
Assurance. Additionally, he focusses on
technology strategic relationships and
collaboration opportunities.
Prasanna may be reached at
prasanna@cigniti.com
About Cigniti Technologies
Cigniti Technologies Inc. is North America's Largest Independent Testing Services Company. Headquartered in Irving,
Texas, Cigniti is recognized as a premier independent testing services organization by Fortune 500 companies and
industry analysts. With over a decade of experience in the Software Quality Assurance industry, Cigniti IP-Led
(SmartTools™) offerings have helped several clients “Shift-Left” and reduce the overall cost of quality.