1. What is Azure DevOps
2. Benefits of Adopting DevOps Azure for Digital Businesses
3. Nine Trending Features of Azure DevOps
4. Conclusion
5. How Can Tx Help with DevOps Azure Adoption?

What is Azure DevOps

Azure DevOps, earlier known as Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS), is a DevOps service offered by Microsoft. The service is based on the Azure cloud computing platform that collaborates Dev, IT, QA, and Security to release better apps faster. Azure DevOps enables businesses to adopt a DevOps culture, the latest practices, and advanced tools to respond better to customer needs and stay ahead of the competition.

Today, Microsoft’s Azure DevOps Server is a trending cloud application development environment. Like most CI/CD platforms, Azure DevOps provides version control, reporting, project management, test automation in agile, build automation, and testing features.

Benefits of Adopting DevOps Azure for Digital Businesses

With the rising popularity of Azure DevOps, digital businesses are adopting the server to make significant improvements in their existing operations. Here are the critical benefits leveraged by businesses with Azure DevOps adoption:

Promotes Innovation:

Azure DevOps adoption results in enhanced business productivity and streamlined processes. This enables more time for the technical departments to research and develop new ideas. The more time a company has to improvise and innovate, the more possibility it has to grow its business.

Enables Quicker Development Cycles:

New business processes, systems, and apps may be quickly deployed using DevOps techniques.  As a result, DevOps deployment leads to more productive business processes, as when teams collaborate on the projects, the associated processes move more quickly. This allows companies to release the apps on time and with lesser to no bugs.

Enhances Team Collaboration:

DevOps enhances communication and cooperation between multiple departments. Teams gradually develop better work relationships within departments. With Azure DevOps implementation, the organization benefits from employees’ productivity through effective collaboration.

Improves End-User Experience:

A digital business is able to provide the business customer quick service if it can swiftly build proprietary solutions. This suggests that using DevOps will enhance your company’s ability to serve customers.

Provides Operational Flexibility:

With safe access to the environment from any location via any device, the Azure DevOps environment gives more flexibility to the teams. Azure DevOps is an incredible tool if a digital business has multiple locations or the team members work remotely.

Saves Time And Money:

The most crucial resources for a business are time and money. In many cases, you can’t afford to waste your resources on products that will only increase your workload. For instance, your business must allocate funds for the necessary infrastructure, server upkeep, and operating system licenses if TFS or other DevOps servers are run locally.

Enables faster problem-solving capabilities:

Enterprises can quickly try to resolve issues with the help of Microsoft Azure DevOps. The ability to resolve the issue in a short amount of time has many benefits. However, process issues may result in severe financial losses for your company. Business losses are avoided when issues are rapidly resolved and progress is made more quickly. Azure DevOps improves your company’s capacity for problem-solving. For all of your business operations, Azure DevOps produces a beneficial improvement.

Nine Trending Features of Azure DevOps

Stand-Alone Installation:

Azure DevOps may be installed on a local server to implement the similar features available with Azure Cloud. Microsoft Azure DevOps is an asset for organizations that need a reliable and robust DevOps framework. It promotes a work culture which enhances collaboration throughout the organization.

Organization:

A single user can be associated with more than one organization and may store the artifacts and code set related to their application. The owner can assign customized permissions, set up security policies, and check individual account billing.

Workflow:

Azure DevOps enables engineers to implement different processes based on Scrum or Agile as per the requirements of the team or project across the organization.

Pipeline Templates:

The pipeline templates available in Azure DevOps can be executed by the user using locally hosted agents or Azure cloud-hosted agents. Depending on the project’s requirements, the templates may be customized as YAML templates.

Azure Artifacts:

Azure DevOps API enables the teams to quickly package the dependencies and other artifacts needed for the deployment and functionality of the application. It makes it simple to distribute and use the application. It offers integrated package management and supports package feeds from public or private sources for Python, Maven, and NuGet.

Resource-Based Access:

It is possible to customize individual project settings within the organization according to the team’s requirements. Resource-based access can also be implemented through Azure DevOps’ permission policy.

Integration:

Users can integrate the app with third-party applications like JIRA, Github or other tool sets using a service connection. The Azure DevOps service offers support for direct integration with Azure Cloud, AWS, and GCP for app deployment using the service connections.

Azure Boards & Repo:

Azure Boards provide interactive and customized tools for better project management. Boards and Repo enables the creation of custom dashboards as per the project requirements. Azure Repo provides a set of version control tools for managing the code sets and tracking the code changes over time.

Azure Test Plans:

Azure Test Plans are a collection of robust and effective tools for application testing, including manual and continuous DevOps testing. It offers a comprehensive solution for scheduled and exploratory testing.

Conclusion

Digital businesses can get custom tools made for them by directly integrating open-source tools into Azure. Azure’s infrastructure as code, continuous monitoring, and continuous integration can all be coupled to the Azure DevOps platform to give a company everything it requires in a single, tightly integrated package. Azure DevOps is an all-in-one platform that enables Dev, QA, and Ops teams to collaborate on projects of all shapes and sizes by providing an exclusive set of features and services that can be leveraged by beginners and experts alike.

How Can Tx Help with DevOps Azure Adoption?

TestingXperts (Tx) empowers digital businesses in Canada, as well as worldwide, with an Enterprise DevOps Transformation by automating all their processes to deliver robust and faster releases.Our clients experience improved team collaboration leading to improved operations, security, and performance testing as a part of our standard DevOps and cloud service offerings, along with delivering cost-effectiveness across the engagement.

TestingXperts Canada has developed a wealth of experience leveraging industry-leading practices to implement a wide range of business solutions, including Azure DevOps services canada. Our highly experienced agile and DevOps testing fortify our ability to manage projects efficiently with increased consistency, decreased risk, and enhanced quality.

Our DevOps Consulting & Implementation Services:

Our DevOps practices include a practical methodology with an integrated approach that consists of action-based forward and backward traceability of debugging, delivery management, provisioning of resources, and automation tools integration. All these are successfully taken up by our DevOps engineers and DevOps experts and ensure the below benefits to enterprises.

• Helps to implement optimized software development processes to optimize application delivery

• Ensure teams develop quality software with assured faster releases

• Delivers improved code with better team collaboration which leads to faster time-to-production

• Ensures code quality assessments along with code security

• Delivers a pragmatic approach to your DevOps adoption

• Improves business bottom line with well-defined automation in place

• Cost optimization is assured with reduced operational costs

• Brings you best practices from the industry for successful DevOps implementations

The post Azure DevOps: 9 Trending Features for Digital Businesses first appeared on TestingXperts.

Content 1. Make your QA and Dev teams work together 2. Common bottlenecks between QA & Dev teams and potential fixes 3. Ways to set up a culture of collaboration between QA and Dev teams 4. How does seamless collaboration between QA & Dev teams ensure improved quality? 5. Conclusion 6. How can TestingXperts help?

Make your QA and Dev teams work together

Today, businesses embrace DevOps processes to streamline deployments, achieve faster releases, and ensure quicker time-to-market. The Development (Dev) and Operations (Ops) teams work collaboratively to enable faster and more continuous releases in a DevOps environment. It is seen that Dev and the Quality Assurance (QA) teams play an essential role wherein Dev teams strive to deliver code on time, while the QA engineers test the software to maintain higher quality. A lot goes on behind the scenes wherein all the teams collaborate towards a common goal of releasing a top-notch product into the market.

It is to be stated that with agile and DevOps adoptions are on the high by businesses, seamless coordination between teams should exist to ensure faster releases and reduced time to market. But, in reality, some pain points or bottlenecks typically affect this symbiotic relationship between the Dev and QA teams.

Common bottlenecks between QA & Dev teams and potential fixes

1. Poor communication:

It is known that successful product releases rely on back-and-forth communication among all the associated departments of QA, Dev, and Ops. It is important to share the project updates and requirements with the teams, including working closely with the designers, managing inputs and feedback across teams, and explaining test reports to developers. Without solid communication and effective collaboration between all teams involved, project delivery and schedule often take a hit.

QA and Dev teams should collaborate and communicate regularly through instant messaging apps, checkpoint meetings and other collaboration tools like Jira, Confluence etc. Both teams should be aware of priorities of each other and plan their activities accordingly.

2. Incomplete Requirements:

Documentation plays a significant role in the success of a project. Both the Dev and the QA teams must have first-hand information or the requirement specifications so that teams are well aware of the project requirements and can quickly jumpstart the project.

Lack of proper understanding of the end-user requirements or expectations can lead to QA testing challenges and unexpected project outcomes and collaboration issues. Both the teams should discuss the requirements and acceptance criteria and form a common understanding of same. Both QAs and Devs should actively participate in grooming sessions, and sprint planning sessions to get proper clarity on these requirements and identify any gaps in the acceptance criteria.

3. Lack of proper governance:

Many organizations see a lack of thought leadership to draw a master plan for effective DevOps implementation. But, the thought leadership needs to take the right step toward the DevOps adoption and maintain a proper balance between the QA and Dev teams. Adoption of DevOps practices may require a lot of effort on R & D initiatives and a clear vision. All the required skillset for implementation of DevOps practices may not be available in-house. In such case, the services of an external vendor with proven experience in implementing such practices should be availed.

4. Lack of details in the reported bugs:

Finding a bug by the QA team and simultaneously reporting the bug correctly in the defect management tool in an understanding format is essential. QA teams should provide relevant screenshots, video artifacts, logs, etc., to showcase the bugs registered to ensure quicker resolution of defects by Dev teams.

Thus, analyzing the above bottlenecks, it becomes essential for enterprises and organizations, irrespective of their size, to consider the below ways to ensure a seamless culture of collaboration between various teams (QA, Dev, Ops) and departments.

Ways to set up a culture of collaboration between QA and Dev teams

Well-defined communication helps ensure the project requirements are well understood between the teams, resulting in faster project delivery. But how is it possible? How can Dev effectively collaborate with QA and vice versa? The nine tips below will help DevOps teams ensure seamless collaboration between them and help to increase their overall productivity to deliver high-quality results to stakeholders.

1. Syncup across the scrum team members:

All teams should attend daily stand-ups to understand the actionable items to be worked on. These short meetings enable the Dev teams to share their future roadblocks/dependencies and facilitate coordination. Similarly, stand-up meetings allow the QA engineers to showcase their successful task status, highlight the critical bottlenecks within the QA process, and discuss ways to eliminate these. Managers can even go further by having weekly or monthly team meetings. These meetings may celebrate the achievements and team progress, appreciate the star performers, and realign the resources if required.

2. Equal participation of teams in project meetings:

Time is critical during the project progress and may be wasted when teams involved do not have the proper information. Both Dev and QA teams should proactively participate in project meetings and share essential data, recommendations, and requirements. This way, the overall project accelerates, preventing high frustration and low productivity incidents at later stages.

3. Share meeting agenda in advance:

It is essential to share the meeting agenda ahead with various teams such that the teams are well-prepared for any reports or data required for the meeting. This advance notice lets the Dev team share their high-level updates with the QA team while the QA team can add the relevant QA-based meeting topics for the Dev team. After the meeting, the Dev and QA teams may consider sharing the meeting notes or action items to motivate teams to collaborate and promote seamless team collaboration.

4. Team motivation:

Scrum masters may have individual conversations with the QA and Dev teams to ensure that the teams stay motivated and work together in harmony. Weekly, monthly, and quarterly meetings may be organized wherein the Dev and QA teams can discuss project goals and what they want to achieve next.

5. Effective communication channel is vital:

The lack of understanding between the QA and Dev departments can ultimately hamper the final product. An effective communication channel is critical for teams to voice their concerns and share recommendations to collaborate better. When working in an agile environment, engineers interact and learn from one another. This includes working together during the sprint cycles and scrum meetings. One more noteworthy DevOps practice is to ensure both verticals know the priorities and action items to reduce any dependencies. It can be done by utilizing some project management tracking tools.

6. Make QA participate in code reviews:

In many organizations, code-reviewing is done with minimal to no involvement of QA engineers. However, that should not be the case. The QA engineers should take part in code reviews to develop appropriate test cases based on different use cases. Thus, understanding of the codebase should not be left only to the developers, and the QA teams should also be involved.

7. Think like a customer:

When QA and Dev teams work on a project, they should understand the scope of customer expectations from the product. The fact is that advancements in technology have raised customer expectations of any product or service. Product companies adopt the customer-centric approach to meet or surpass customer satisfaction and deliver high-quality products to enable a great customer experience.

8. Have post-sprint review meetings:

The post-sprint review is an easy step that’s even easier to overlook. It is required to have a short meeting with the QA and Dev teams to discuss their development process experience. Teams can discuss what worked well, enhancements’ scope, gaps or miscommunications, etc. When everyone is pushing hard towards meeting strict deadlines, it may not be possible to make changes in the existing processes, no matter how beneficial they are. Post-sprint reviews are the best place for QA and Dev teams to identify what strategies need a retrospection and make the necessary arrangements moving forward.

How does seamless collaboration between QA & Dev teams ensure improved quality?

Effective collaboration can shape how QA and Dev teams deliver quality results in a DevOps environment. It requires all the engineering teams — Dev, QA, IT, and others — to come together and create high-quality products. When the collaboration goals are met, QA teams can perform continuous testing (CT) and push regular test results and feedback into the continuous integration(CI) system. As a result, faster feedback loops are created, facilitating continuous delivery (CD) and quicker time-to-market.

Thus, a strong collaboration between Dev and QA teams ensures effective CI, CT, and CD and enables faster and quality releases due to the quick feedback loop between teams and product owners. Therefore, strong collaboration between departments ensures everyone is responsible for the product quality and its timely releases. Thus, seamless team collaboration makes the development and testing processes go hand-in-hand, ensuring superior quality products for a great customer experience (CX).

Conclusion

With businesses embracing DevOps, it becomes essential to have a seamless collaboration between Dev, Ops, and QA teams. When we speak of agile methodologies and DevOps-driven business models, it is evident that the QA and Dev teams must work in sync toward making the product as flawless as possible. QA and Dev teams may be different but are entirely interdependent.

The Dev team’s role should not be limited to developing a product but a product that has achieved the maximum possible quality. Similarly, for the QA team, their job is not just about testing the product but prioritizing the QA tasks so that the Dev teams can fix errors in time and deliver a quality product. Therefore, it becomes necessary that all teams strive for a common goal of achieving unmatched product quality and not just fulfilling their tasks. Further, this seamless collaboration will help deliver a high-quality product for enabling a seamless CX.

How can TestingXperts help?

TestingXperts’ reliable team of quality assurance and software testing engineers is experienced with the latest testing tools, trends, and methodologies. Leverage next-gen testing services from us with customized and client-centric engagement models to achieve high-quality and cost-effective solutions.

The post How to Ensure QA & Dev Team Collaboration for Achieving Improved Quality? first appeared on TestingXperts.

Content 1. An overview of AI in DevOps 2. How is AI in DevOps revolutionizing product releases? 3. Impact of Leveraging AI in DevOps 4. How does AI-powered DevOps enable improved CX? 5. Best practices to implement AI in DevOps 6. Future trends of AI and DevOps in 2022 7. Conclusion

Improving the existing customer experience (CX) is a key driver behind digital transformation initiatives. For digital businesses, CX is one of the primary metrics for measuring the quality and efficiency of their products and services. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are trending these days; similar is the case with the DevOps world. These next-gen technologies transform DevOps by automating tasks and making the product development life cycle more customer-centric. From decision-making process improvements to automated operations and code quality enhancements, the future of AI in DevOps looks promising for enabling a great CX.

An overview of AI in DevOps

Today organizations are focused on being data-driven to incorporate the capabilities of AI & ML to achieve their ambition. The usage of AI & ML is set for tremendous growth in multiple folds in almost all the fields across industries such as healthcare, BFSI, retail & eCommerce, EduTech, etc.

Since the development of AI aims to leverage data, the inclusion of ML and AI in DevOps enables businesses to witness the true potential of digital transformation. For DevOps organizations running on real-time data, AI & ML enables automatic integration of technology components, intelligent QA analysis, bug fixes before the execution of release pipelines, automated reporting, and more.

How is AI in DevOps revolutionizing product releases?

Improves data access:

DevOps environment generates a lot of data. The teams sometimes face issues accessing that data, but Artificial Intelligence helps compile and organize data from multiple sources. This data helps to analyse and give a good picture of trends.

Enhances application security:

AI and ML can help detect Distributed Denial of Service threats by using algorithms to differentiate normal as well as abnormal conditions.

Ensures efficient Software testing:

AI collects and identifies the pattern of software testing data generated via various types of testing performed in a DevOps environment. This data is used by the DevOps teams to identify the root cause of errors in coding practices and fix them to increase the process efficiency.

Prioritizes alerts:

The DevOps team receives alerts with no priority tags. This makes it quite difficult for the teams to manage these alerts. AI helps the DevOps teams to prioritize alerts based on key metrics such as behavior, source of the alert, etc.

Refines feedback loops:

The primary function of DevOps is to use monitoring tools and collect feedback from every stage. AI tools use features such as log files, performance metrics, etc., to provide and apply intelligent decisions.

Impact of Leveraging AI in DevOps

By streamlining and accelerating every phase of the SDLC, AI takes DevOps to a new level of accuracy, efficiency, and credibility. Here are the key impacts DevOps teams experience when leveraging AI into their existing DevOps processes:

Quality checking:

AI facilitates the creation of comprehensive test patterns according to the learning from previous releases and leads to optimized and continuous delivery.

Efficient production cycle:

AI efficiently analyzes resource utilization and similar patterns to detect any memory leaks that may lead to production issues.

Prompt addressing:

AI and ML play a crucial role in dealing with sudden alerts by continuously training the system to identify the anomaly.

Early detection:

AI detects the issues and immediately alerts the Ops team for prompt mitigation that leads to business continuity.

Business assessments:

While DevOps pays high regard to understand code release for achieving business goals, AI tools analyze the pattern-based functionality of the application through user metrics and alert the respective business teams in case of any issue.

How does AI-powered DevOps enable improved CX?

Integrating AI in DevOps improves existing functions and processes and simultaneously provides DevOps teams with innovative resources to meet and even surpass user expectations. Here is how AI within DevOps enable improved CX:

Operational Benefits of AI in DevOps

Instant Dev and Ops cycles:

With AI, DevOps teams can provide superior CX by optimizing application performance through rapid Dev and Ops cycles. Insights on user behavior enable the DevOps teams to prioritize the performance updates for future application releases that enhances the user experience.

Test more, release better:

DevOps teams test, code, release, and monitor application behavior. By leveraging AI, DevOps teams can accelerate these steps as well as identify and fix bugs promptly, enabling an amazing CX.

Improve application security:

AI-based algorithms improve the way DevOps teams detect and fix the security threats of the application. With the help of AI, DevOps teams can effectively highlight false positives, suspicious activities, and more.

Growth benefits of AI in DevOps

Rapid CX enhancements:

AI reveals key insights that directly impact CX for DevOps teams and help them rapidly make informed decisions. By leveraging AI, teams analyze the insights and refine their existing CX strategy by providing real-time responses to customer inquiries.

Optimizes customer interactions:

Businesses leverage AI-based interactions into all the leading customer-facing channels that personalize the CX and provide them with prompt resolutions.

Process automation:

AI enables DevOps teams to automate behind-the-scenes processes like email marketing, social media promotions, targeted automated marketing promotions, SMS promotions, etc.

These benefits, however, may only be achieved in full length when DevOps teams follow the best practices of implementing AI in DevOps, as described below:

Best practices to implement AI in DevOps

Utilize advanced APIs:

The Dev team should gain experience with canned APIs like Azure and AWS that deliver robust AI capabilities without generating any self-developed models. This facilitates accessible development where the Dev teams can work on enhancing the models as per use cases and integrate add-ons to create advanced patterns.

Train with public data:

DevOps teams should leverage public data sets for the initial training of DevOps models. This data may not be an exact match with the project’s requirements but can effectively fill the gap to build up the project visibility.

Implement parallel pipelines:

As AI is still evolving, DevOps teams should run parallel pipelines to ensure that the entire system does not come to a halt in case anything breaks. DevOps teams should gradually implement AI to effectively inline the project’s progress with AI adoption into the DevOps ecosystem.

Deploy pre-trained models:

Pre-trained or documented models accelerate the adoption of AI capabilities of DevOps ecosystems. Past search patterns can be utilized as references to recognize inputs or user behavior and make intelligent business decisions.

Future trends of AI and DevOps in 2022

Data fabric:

Enables flexible integration of data sources across multiple users and platforms that make data available on-demand irrespective of the data location. Data fabric will rely on analytics to reduce data management efforts by 70%

Cybersecurity mesh:

Enables comprehensive security solutions that can quickly verify identity, context, and policy adherence across cloud and non-cloud environments.

Hyperautomation:

Enables rapid identification and automation of all possible business and IT processes. Hyperautomation will help businesses leverage AI-driven DevOps with scalability and business model disruption.

Decision intelligence:

Enables businesses to improve their decision-making abilities via AI, augmented analytics, and simulations.

Total experience:

Enables a business to comprehend various touchpoints such as experiences of employees, customers, and application user experience to accelerate UX optimization.

Conclusion

By using a systematic DevOps approach, digital businesses have been promoting close coordination between their Dev, Ops, and customer support teams for faster development, and quicker updates. However, as the next-gen technologies transform DevOps by automating tasks and making the product development life cycle more customer-centric, it is evident that the future of DevOps will be influenced incredibly by AI.

By leveraging AI, DevOps-driven businesses can execute data-driven and continuous development and enhance the overall CX. As the DevOps teams deep dive into the user behavior, they can target and enhance the essential UX areas. Integrating AI-powered capabilities into the existing DevOps ecosystem will improve the traditional processes and help businesses be at the forefront of cutting-edge innovation.

The post How Does AI in DevOps Enable Improved CX? first appeared on TestingXperts.

Every business needs high-performing and seamless applications (mobile & web) to increase user engagement and deliver a great customer experience (CX). Today, businesses continue to embrace DevOps to get faster releases and high-quality software that embeds continuous integration, continuous testing, and delivery. The DevOps continuous testing involves functional, performance, security, and other testing methods to ensure flawless, high-quality apps. Specifically, performance testing plays a critical role in improving the scalability, reliability, and robustness of the apps before they are released into the market.

Content 1. What is Performance Testing? 2. Some of the Use cases of Performance testing 3. Benefits of performance testing 4. Various types of Performance Testing 5. An overview of performance testing in DevOps 6. Performance testing in DevOps CI/CD pipeline 7. Performance testing process overview 8. Performance testing metrics to measure mobile app performance 9. How is performance testing important for data migration and ETL testing? 10. Significance of think time in performance testing 11. An overview of automated performance testing tools 12. Conclusion

What is Performance Testing?

Performance testing is a non-functional software testing method performed to check the software’s speed, responsiveness, scalability, stability, and reliability. The primary aim of this testing method is to remove performance bottlenecks from the app/software and ensure seamless performance under all conditions such as varying user loads, fluctuating networks, varying network bandwidths, etc.

Some of the Use cases of Performance testing

• Checking app performance by simultaneously running multiple applications in the background

• Verifying app performance when multiple users login at the same time

• Checking app performance by suddenly increasing/decreasing user load

• Checking app performance under various types of networks, such as Wi-Fi, LAN, 3G, 4G, etc.

• Checking app responsiveness by taking into consideration the app response to user queries

Benefits of performance testing

1. Improves website speed:

Common issues like broken images, content-related issues, frequent timeouts, etc., hamper the website speed. This non-functional testing method helps identify and resolve these issues, thus enhancing the website speed.

2. Removes performance bottlenecks from apps:

This software testing ensures the removal of critical bugs and performance bottlenecks from the software before it goes live.

3. Ensures scalability, reliability, and robustness of apps:

This testing type ensures that the software is scalable and can handle users even during peak loads. It ensures that the software performs well under unexpected situations like fluctuating networks, bandwidths, user load, etc. Thus, it ensures the software’s scalability, reliability, and robustness.

4. Enhances customer experience (CX):

End-users don’t prefer slow-loading apps and websites. This testing method helps in improving the app’s performance and speed, which ultimately enhances the CX.

5. Helps to generate more revenue:

It is known that end-users prefer apps with seamless performance. Better app performance will generate more revenue for businesses as users prefer to download such seamless apps, especially for eCommerce, telecom, and healthcare sector apps.

Various types of Performance Testing

1. Load Testing:

Testers perform this testing by simulating the number of virtual users that might use the application. The principal aim of this testing method is to ensure that the application performs well under normal and peak user loads.

2. Stress Testing:

This testing technique helps identify the system’s breaking point when user load is increased beyond the expected peak.

3. Endurance Testing:

This testing helps identify any resource leakage in the system, while it is subjected to normal user load for an extended duration like 8 hours, 12 hours, 24 hours, or 48 hours, etc.

4. Spike Testing:

It is a subset of stress testing and checks the system’s behavior by suddenly varying the no. of users. This testing checks if the system can handle the variations in user load.

5. Volume Testing:

In this testing method, multiple data-intensive transactions are performed to validate how the system performs under such data volumes.

6. Scalability Testing:

This testing method determines the capability of the system to scale up in terms of user load, data volume, number of transactions, etc. The main aim of this testing method is to determine the peak point beyond which the system prevents more scaling.

7. Component-level performance testing:

An application comprises minor components that are the smallest parts of an application. In component-level performance testing, the individual components of the application are tested to ensure the effective performance of components in isolation. Later, all the app components are tested as a group to ensure a high-performing and fully integrated application. Further, these components are integrated, and finally, performance testing is executed after integration.

An overview of performance testing in DevOps

Businesses continue to embrace DevOps to get faster releases and high-quality in less time. This DevOps methodology promotes collaboration between teams to deliver faster and quality releases to the customer. The DevOps lifecycle includes various stages such as Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Testing (CT), and Continuous Delivery (CD). Typically, to ensure the release of high-quality software in less time, performance testing in DevOps plays a critical role. Moreover, performance testing in DevOps is done by integrating continuous and automated performance testing in the continuous delivery pipeline. However, to take up performance and load testing in DevOps, a series of steps should be followed at each stage of the DevOps lifecycle.

Performance testing in DevOps CI/CD pipeline

Performance testing in DevOps involves continuous performance evaluation at each DevOps CI/CD pipeline stage and ensures faster feedback loops for software improvement. 

1. Code and build stage:

DevOps performance testing starts with continuous performance testing at the build stage, which involves unit performance testing. In this stage, the smallest unit of the software is checked to ensure they perform well in isolation.

2. Integration stage:

Once the unit performance testing is done, performance testing is done at the integration stage, where the smallest units of the software are integrated. The performance of these integrated units/modules is tested to ensure the effective performance of modules after integration.

3. Test stage:

During this stage, system-level performance testing is done to ensure the software performs well as expected. Once the system-level performance tests are passed, the software moves to the release and deploy stage.

4. Release and deploy stage:

During this stage, load testing and real user monitoring are performed to ensure that the software handles the user load effectively in the production environment.

5. Monitoring stage:

After the software reaches the monitoring stage, continuous performance monitoring is done, where various performance metrics are evaluated to determine areas that need improvement.

Performance testing process overview

1. Prepare performance testing checklist:

Testers should prepare a checklist before starting the test. Performance testing checklist includes what is to be tested, pass/fail criteria, user scenarios, issues to be monitored, etc. While preparing the checklist, testers need to gather the client’s requirements. 

2. Plan the test:

Prepare a test plan or test strategy which covers the aim and scope of testing, application architecture, environment details, testing tools, roles, responsibilities, etc.

3. Setup the test environment:

Testers need to set up the test environment. There are two types of test environments, on-premise, and on-cloud. The test environment should be chosen wisely, as the effectiveness of the testing process largely depends on the environment in which it is executed. Load generation environment should be configured to generate virtual load for load testing of the software.

4. Prepare test data:

To set up the test data, testers need to first extract test data, modify the data for testing the software, and generate enough test data to perform the tests.

5. Prepare test scripts, execute the test and analyze the results:

This is an important step that involves preparation of test scripts, execution of test cases, and analysis of test results to know whether it is pass or fail.

6. Fix the bugs:

The Dev team resolves all the bugs found during the testing process. Once all the bugs are fixed, the testing process is repeated to ensure defects are fixed.

7. Prepare test report:

Document all the test findings in one place and share the test report with all the stakeholders and project team.

Performance testing metrics to measure mobile app performance

1. App installation time:

This metric gives the user a first impression of the app. This metric measures the app installation time and how it can be improved.

2. App launch time:

App launch time or app start time is another important metric that must be checked in an application. Ideally, it should not be more than 1 to 2 seconds.

3. App background processing:

It is essential to ensure that app performance remains unaffected when multiple apps run parallelly. It is essential to ensure that no data loss should happen when the app runs in the background and is retrieved.

4. Client-side resource usage:

An app should not consume excess memory and must not heat the device, especially when it runs in the background. Thus, checking an app’s CPU usage and memory during its execution is essential.

5. Response time:

This metric measures the time is taken by an app to respond to a given input. Faster response time ensures less wait time and high performance of the app.

6. Average load time:

Load time of app/website and page load time is very important for users and businesses. Faster loading time or speed ensures better performance of an app.

7. Bandwidth and network compatibility:

Varying bandwidth and fluctuating networks affect the app loading time. However, to ensure effective app performance, it is essential to perform load testing of an app with minimal bandwidth and different network types and connections such as 3G, 4G, 5G, Wi-FI, etc.

8. Concurrent users:

This metric measures how many virtual users are active or accessing the app at a given point in time. The number of users using the app directly impacts the app’s performance.

9. Requests per second:

It is the measure of how many requests by second the server can handle without degrading performance or resulting in error.

How is performance testing important for data migration and ETL testing?

Data migration is a complex but essential process for every business. Effective data migration helps businesses ensure better data availability, reduced cost, improved performance, and more. However, while migrating data from various sources to a new system, it is essential to ensure that the new system’s performance remains unaffected after migration. This is where the need for performance testing during data migration comes into the picture. In this testing type, various performance tests are executed on the system before and after migration to ensure the new system’s performance is not degraded post-migration.

Performance and load testing play a vital role in the Extract/Transform/Load (ETL) process. The data is extracted from various sources during the ETL process, transformed into a consistent data type, and then loaded into the data warehouse or target system. Performance testing in ETL is done to ensure that the ETL system can handle a high volume of transactions. Performance tests in ETL also verify the efficiency of the ETL system by determining the actual time taken by the system to process data. The lesser the data processing time, the higher is the efficiency.

Significance of think time in performance testing

Think time is the time difference between each action performed by the user. When users visit a website, they take some time to think and take action. The difference or the time gap between each action performed by the user is known as think time.

For example, suppose a user visits an eCommerce website. The user clicks on the products tab, selects the product, reads the description, and adds the product to the cart. The time spent between clicking on the product tab to clicking on the add to cart tab is considered think time.

Think time plays a very crucial role, as it represents the user’s actual behavior in the system. A user never does all actions like login, search product, add to cart, payment, log out in one go. The users take some time to complete all actions. Therefore, it is necessary to introduce think time in this non-functional software testing technique to create a real-world scenario in the testing environment.

Another reason to introduce think time in performance and load testing is that suppose if a tester executes software testing giving multiple requests with no pause, it will fail the server. The server also needs time to process requests and give the result. Therefore, it is essential to consider think time in performance and load testing.

An overview of automated performance testing tools

1. Apache JMeter:

It is an open-source tool that helps to analyze and measure the performance of a range of web applications. This tool supports various protocols, such as HTTP, HTTPS, XML, SOAP, Java-based protocols, etc. This non-functional software testing tool requires less scripting effort as compared to other tools and has simple charts/graphs that can be used for analyzing key load-related statistics and resource usage.

2. WebLOAD:

It is an enterprise-scale load testing tool that is used for web and mobile load testing. This tool comes with a good number of features and functionalities, such as Load Generation Console, Analytics Dashboard, and comprehensive IDE.

3. Stress Stimulus:

This tool is used to perform load testing of web apps, mobile apps, and enterprise apps. Stress stimulus supports on-premise or cloud load testing and works well with Fiddler. This tool comes with an end-to-end test wizard that eases the performance testing of mobile and web apps.

4. io:

It is a multiplatform performance and load testing tool. This tool allows adding performance testing into the continuous integration process, real-time monitoring of the test environment, and analyzing test results on multiple machines.

5. NeoLoad:

It is a continuous performance testing tool for desktop and mobile apps. This tool comes with great features like scriptless test creation, GUI-driven design, automated parameterization, etc. Neoload can be easily integrated with CI tools, and it allows real-time identification and removal of performance bottlenecks.

6. Load Runner:

It is the most widely used tool to test applications and measure system behavior and performance under varying loads. This tool is used to simulate thousands of concurrent users and record the variations in the system performance. This testing tool supports all advanced technologies like Ajax, Flex, HTML5.0, Java, SOAP, Citrix, along with all other legacy technologies.

7. LoadView:

It is used for cloud-based load testing, and it helps DevOps teams to test websites, web apps, and application programming interfaces (APIs) with thousands of concurrent users. This tool simulates API calls, validates API responses, and verifies the most important SLA requirements. The agile and DevOps teams can test their website’s UX under load, verify performance and identify various bottlenecks within the applications.

Conclusion

Performance testing is an essential element that determines the success of an application in DevOps processes. A high-performing app is the need of the hour for businesses and the low performance of the app can affect the brand reputation and even the CX. Hence, a well-developed performance testing method and proper automated tools should be leveraged to get high-performing and scalable apps. Thus, enterprises should leverage end-to-end performance testing from a next-gen QA and independent software testing services provider for high-performing software and faster time to market.

The post How to Do Performance Testing in DevOps? first appeared on TestingXperts.

Today, every enterprise needs high-quality products and faster time-to-market to deliver a great customer experience (CX). But for businesses to fulfil the rising need for high-quality products, adoption of the latest and robust software development and testing methodologies is necessary. This is where the agile and DevOps methodology comes into the picture.

The agile methodology plays a significant role in improving the team’s productivity with its iterative model. Whereas, DevOps methodology ensures effective collaboration between the development (Dev) and the operations (Ops) teams. Since Agile and DevOps methodologies are critical for enabling faster and quality releases, businesses are adopting them rapidly.

Content 1.  Overview of Agile and DevOps Methodologies 2.  Agile Vs DevOps Methodologies – Detailed Comparison 3.  Various Phases of Agile and DevOps Lifecycle 4.  How has the Journey from Agile to DevOps helped Businesses? 5.  Significance of DevOps CI/CD Implementation in today’s Agile Environment 6.  Major Software Testing Types for Successful DevOps CI/CD Implementation 7.  Conclusion 8.  How Can TestingXperts (Tx) help?

Overview of Agile and DevOps Methodologies

Agile Methodology

It is a software testing methodology that is guided by certain principles stated in the agile manifesto for software development. This methodology follows an incremental/iterative approach, and the main aim of this approach is to deliver quality software. It also involves continuous collaboration between stakeholders and teams and ensures continuous improvement of product’s quality. Moreover, in this approach, the software is developed and tested in small stages known as sprints, and each sprint varies from 1-3 weeks.

DevOps Methodology

This methodology aims to break traditional silos between cross-functional teams in the waterfall model. It is an evolution from agile methodology and is an enterprise software development and testing approach that emphasizes collaboration and communication between cross-functional teams. This approach involves continuous development, continuous integration, continuous testing, continuous delivery, and continuous monitoring processes to ensure faster releases and high-quality software.

Agile Vs DevOps Methodologies – Detailed Comparison

Various Phases of Agile and DevOps Lifecycle

How has the Journey from Agile to DevOps helped Businesses?

In 2001, the agile manifesto had its birth which gave rise to the agile methodology. This manifesto contained certain values and principles that guide developers and testers to break the project into smaller parts, accelerate feedback loops and align product features with customer needs. The early adopters of agile methodology were small software start-ups that were eager to disrupt the market and were willing to take the risk. As this methodology matured, large enterprises started adopting it. The agile approach worked fine for some time as it helped developers to produce software in smaller parts. But later, it was realized that it lacks the capability of continuous testing and continuous delivery.

Due to the rising need for faster releases, high-quality software and faster time-to-market, businesses needed advanced methodologies such as DevOps processes. Companies started shifting from Agile to DevOps methodology as it helped them in many ways as listed below:

Significance of DevOps CI/CD Implementation in today’s Agile Environment

CI/CD stands for Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD), wherein a modern software coding philosophy allows developers to implement small changes and check code frequently. The main goal of CI is to establish a consistent and automated way to build, package, and test applications. CD is closely related to CI and enables automation of the entire software delivery process by leveraging automation tools. Further, it commits and delivers the integrated code into the production stage without any bugs or delays.

Both CI and CD are the backbone of today’s DevOps environment. There are various benefits that businesses can leverage by implementing the DevOps CI/CD pipeline.

• Helps in early bug detection –

• Improves the software quality –

• Ensures faster time-to-market-

• Allows faster feedback –

• Provides greater visibility –

• Automation saves QA teams time and efforts –

Evidently, for businesses to reap complete benefits, they should embark on scalable CI/CD DevOps implementations by leveraging various software testing methods.

Major Software Testing Types for Successful DevOps CI/CD Implementation

1. Test automation in DevOps-

2. Security Testing –

3. Performance Testing –

4. Accessibility testing –

5. Usability Testing –

Conclusion

Businesses are rapidly moving towards DevOps methodology for various reasons. Firstly, it is an evolution from agile methodology thus making it easier for today’s businesses to adopt it. Secondly, this methodology allows businesses to reach the market faster and improve organizational culture. Lastly, it ensures great customer satisfaction, which is the need of the hour for all businesses. Businesses must leverage test automation in DevOps from the next-gen QA and independent software testing services provider for successful DevOps implementation and faster delivery of high-quality products.

How Can TestingXperts (Tx) help?

TestingXperts (Tx) has been at the forefront in enabling test automation in DevOps services using the latest software test automation tools and also with an in-house accelerator, ‘Tx-Automate.’ Our test automation services best support business objectives by enabling an effective test automation strategy that is aligned with enterprise’s business goals.

The post Agile Vs DevOps Methodologies – A Detailed Comparison first appeared on TestingXperts.

Today, businesses must adopt changes and implement them to survive and grow in a highly volatile market at the earliest in their organisations. Interestingly, small-scale companies or start-ups in the United Kingdom can easily adapt to these changes, while large-scale enterprises may face difficulties in adapting and implementing these changes.But, it is inevitable for businesses of all sizes to adapt to the new trends of digital transformation and DevOps methodologies to beat the competition.

To achieve a seamless DevOps transformation in their enterprise and gain significant results, businesses in the UK should follow specific steps. Even before highlighting the DevOps transformation steps, let us understand about DevOps methodology.

What is DevOps Transformation?

DevOps is an evolution from agile methodology and is an enterprise transformation approach. It aims to break traditional silos that earlier existed between cross-functional teams. This methodology brings the developer teams, operation teams, QA teams together. It puts individuals, processes, and products together to help organisations release high-quality software faster than the earlier traditional approaches. DevOps transformation is said to play a key role in achieving successful digital transformation for today’s enterprises.

What does enterprise DevOps Transformation mean?

Enterprise DevOps transformation is a process wherein enterprises reshape their organisational strategy and bring positive cultural change by implementing DevOps practices and breaking traditional silos. DevOps processes with CI, continuous testing, and continuous delivery results in improving business processes and ensures faster software delivery.

DevOps practices are combined with advanced technologies such as Artificial intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to bring more agility in teams and speed up the software delivery process in the enterprises DevOps transformation journey.

Seven-Step approach for Enterprise DevOps Transformation in the UK

1. Plan strategically as a first key step

Before starting the agile and DevOps transformation process, it is essential to prepare a DevOps transformation plan. The plan should cover all aspects of the transformation journey and guide teams to move ahead in the transformation process.  

At this stage, it is essential to ensure that the goals and objectives of the transformation are communicated across the organisation; teams should be assured of management support in the challenges ahead, and transparency across teams. Securing and gaining trust from individuals is critical for the success of the DevOps transformation process as it considerably reduces the chances of resistance.

2. Establish DevOps Centre of Excellence (DCoE)

DevOps Centre of Excellence (DCoE) is a shared platform where DevOps practitioners share their experiences and learn from each other. The DevOps CoE must include representatives from all delivery teams and vendor organisations. It should be led by an enterprise leader who has support from all levels in the organisation. It is preferred to have an experienced external partner to conduct the initial phases of CoE. This DevOps transformation takes a time of 12-24 months to ensure the complete transition.

3. Build a culture of learning and collaboration in the enterprise

DevOps brings a change in the business processes, and the organisational culture is more prone to resistance from employees. This sudden change can also cause some temporary strain to some parts of the business. Still, it can effectively be addressed by building a culture of inclusion, boosting the morale of individuals & teams, and ensuring collaboration between teams. It is more likely that with agile and DevOps transformation, practitioner’s roles and responsibilities will change. Thus, teams should be provided with an ideal organisational culture and learning environment that empowers them and fosters a collaborative environment. However, businesses must note that cultural change has to happen from the top down.

4. Set up DevOps KPIs and governing mechanism

At this stage, organisation must streamline their business processes, align communication channels to achieve successful DevOps transformation. Enterprises must establish DevOps Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to govern the culture of the enterprise.

The organisational culture typically needs effective governance, and this is where governing principles come into the picture. Governing principles or DevOps KPIs ensures safe and effective DevOps transformation. Enterprises must set the roles and responsibilities of DevOps practitioners, share awareness about team collaboration to empower teams.

5. Conduct workshops for scrum teams

This step plays a vital role in the DevOps transformation journey. It is essential to conduct workshops for the scrum teams with the help of subject matter experts (SMEs) to ensure the right sizing of tools and processes. At this stage, enterprises must look at their existing tools and technologies to identify which tools will work for the organisation, and action can be taken accordingly. Further, this step also ensures that selecting tools, accelerators, and methods is more purposeful and help teams realize the DevOps goals. As the DevOps process moves, the intake process can be altered based on the need and further evolved according to the needs and feedback from experts.

6. Run the pilot program and compare results with KPIs

At this stage, the DevOps practitioners identify the right applications and domains to apply DevOps practices. The identified portfolio should be such that it can be scaled up to the enterprise level. The right way to execute this step is to apply the pilot projects according to the domains of the development process.

Ensure that all the details needed to run an end-to-end process such as toolset, personnel, manual, and automated testing processes are all set ready. Run the pilot test and compare results with KPIs to measure the level of success.

7. Gather feedback and scale-out DevOps program

The last and final step is to gather feedback from the pilot tests’ metrics and scale them through multiple releases across different application portfolios. Since DevOps is not a one-time process, it is essential to ensure continuous feedback, optimisation, and continuous deployment throughout the DevOps transformation journey.

Conclusion

Digital transformation and DevOps have become the core elements for today’s enterprises in the United Kingdom. DevOps practices have completely reinvented the way businesses deliver the product to the customer enabling a great user experience. With the help of DevOps, enterprises can deliver high-quality products to the customer faster than ever. However, it is quite challenging for enterprises to completely transform their existing business processes and adopt DevOps.

Therefore, to ensure a successful DevOps transformation process, enterprises should build effective DevOps transformation strategy, follow step-wise DevOps transformation approaches, and lay out a proper DevOps transformation roadmap. Businesses in the UK must seek the help of DevOps transformation services providers to start their DevOps transformation journey and achieve quality results tailored for the UK market.

The post A Seven-Step Approach to Enterprise DevOps Transformation first appeared on TestingXperts.

Content 1.  9 Best Practices for DevOps Transformation  1.1  Align goals with business objectives  1.2  Maximize the usage of automation tools and technology  1.3  Monitor continuously CI/CD pipelines  1.4  Measure DevOps performance continuously  1.5  Focus on the continuous feedback mechanism  1.6  Monitor proactively production environment  1.7  Go serverless to reap maximum benefits  1.8  Focus on end-user experience  1.9  Time-to-market is critical 2.  Conclusion 3.  Our DevOps Consulting & Implementation services

As the world is moving towards digital transformation, competition among enterprises and businesses is rising at a fast pace. Enterprises of all sizes (small, medium, and large-sized) are trying to figure out innovative ways and leverage the latest IT technology and software development methodologies to stay ahead of the competition. One such that has taken the software development life cycle (SDLC) altogether to a new shift is the most widely used agile & DevOps practices.

Typically, for enterprises to become digital-first, adopting DevOps best practices by using continuous integration and continuous delivery of software is the best and fastest way to achieve faster releases and go-to-market early.

The DevOps practices foster increased collaboration between development and operation teams, thus ensuring a better environment for faster releases as Continuous Integration (CI)  and Continuous Development (CD) go hand-in-hand with the CI/CD pipelines enabled.  Although many enterprises have gained immense benefits after adopting DevOps, the key to success lies in the correct implementation of DevOps practices.

Below mentioned are 9 best practices for DevOps transformation that you should consider if you are thinking of embarking on the DevOps journey.

9 Best Practices for DevOps Transformation

1. Align goals with business objectives:

People, process, and tools are three pillars that play a major role in the DevOps processes and for a successful DevOps transformation, enterprises should first identify the right stakeholders who should be involved in the process. Then identification of the right automation tools is required and then finally the processes of the enterprise should be aligned such that it matches with the objective and goals of your business.

However, it is essential to keep your stakeholders who are involved to be aware and make them get aligned in the development processes. It is a must to take necessary inputs from them and timely gather information on challenges if any for DevOps transformations.

2. Maximize the usage of automation tools and technology:

To successfully embark on a digital transformation journey, enterprises should make maximum usage of automation tools and technologies. Automation is a basic requirement for DevOps and is embedded in DevOps processes to ensure faster releases to ensure faster time-to-market. Moreover, test automation starts from the code generation stage and continues till the monitoring stage of the DevOps processes.

There are a lot of DevOps automation tools available in the market that enterprises can leverage. These automation tools help organizations to deploy applications in a much faster and efficient manner. Automation ensures accuracy, consistency, reliability, and increases the number of releases such that more features are delivered in lesser time.

3. Monitor continuously CI/CD pipelines:

Continuous monitoring of CI/CD pipelines is very important for successful enterprise DevOps transformations. Continuous monitoring helps in quick failure identification and there are many DevOps monitoring, DevOps alerting, and DevOps visualization tools that enterprises can leverage. Most of the DevOps monitoring tools work well for every infrastructure like cloud, containerized, and on-premise therefore, it ensures a smooth DevOps transformation process.

Effective use of the DevOps monitoring tools will create an efficient and strong monitoring ecosystem and will enable teams to improve the software product’s quality.

4. Measure DevOps performance continuously:

The ultimate objective of DevOps is to deliver faster to production. Therefore to validate whether or not this objective is being met, it is important to measure DevOps performance.

The four key metrics namely Lead time, Deployment frequency, Failure Rate, and Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) must be carefully monitored by enterprises to assess overall DevOps performance. These metrics altogether help determine the team’s software delivery performance and DevOps teams can experiment with the approach and can measure the impact using these performance-based metrics. These metrics push teams to focus on collaboration to achieve a common goal.

5. Focus on the continuous feedback mechanism:

Today, many enterprises are struggling to provide such software that satisfies their customer and for this, the software should be customer-centric. But how will enterprises know whether the deployed software is meeting customer expectations or not?

DevOps typically is enabled by a continuous feedback mechanism and as teams work collaboratively,  various stakeholders such as product owners, QA teams, developers, and operations teams get the required information faster.

6. Monitor proactively production environment:

Enterprises need to ensure that once their teams have written the code, tested it, built it and their software gets ready to release for production, the production environment should be made ready for the release.

Evidently, if the production environment is not ready, it might act as a barrier to the success of the DevOps transformation process. Therefore, it is essential to check the preparedness of the production environment and must keep a check on the firewall configurations, backups and disaster recovery, security controls, physical and remote access, etc.

7. Go serverless to reap maximum benefits:

To realize the highest potential of DevOps, enterprises should adopt serverless infrastructure. Serverless architecture helps developers and operations teams to pay more attention to building and deploying apps instead of infrastructure management as more operations and management tasks get handled by the serverless providers.

There are various tools such as Google Cloud, AWS Lambda, Azure functions, etc. that enterprises can leverage to successfully run application code on serverless infrastructures to meet the needs of various DevOps organizations.

8. Focus on end-user experience:

Once the application is deployed it will interact with existing and new systems and therefore, make sure you keep track and focus on the end-user experience. The success of your application or service is determined by the satisfaction of these end users only. Hence, it is essential to interact with end-users at every step of the way which means after the deployment stage also and not just at the ideation or development phase.

It is essential to evaluate and understand the issues faced by users to know about their priorities which should be valued. Use this knowledge to define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and continuous feedback throughout the DevOps toolchain to deliver a great customer experience with high-quality solutions.

9. Time-to-market is critical:

Today’s businesses need faster and quality releases for which embracing DevOps methodology helps in going to market faster. As software evolves, new features should be released to market more frequently, and DevOps CI/CD processes along with leveraging the latest automation tools helps with faster releases and ensures to go-to-market faster.

Conclusion:

As enterprises move ahead in their DevOps transformation journey, they must remember that DevOps is not an overnight process, rather it requires a long-term commitment. The success of DevOps lies in the right way of implementation and this can be achieved by following certain best practices as mentioned in this blog. To get strategic DevOps implementation, leverage our next-gen DevOps consulting and implementation services

Our DevOps Consulting & Implementation services

• Helps to implement optimized software development processes to optimize application delivery

• Ensures teams to develop quality software with assured faster releases

• Delivers improved code with better team collaboration which leads to faster time-to-production

• Ensures code quality assessments along with code security

• Delivers a pragmatic approach to your DevOps adoption

• Improves business bottom line with well-defined automation in place

• Cost optimization is assured with reduced operational costs

• Brings you best practices from the industry for successful DevOps implementations

The post 9 Best Practices for A Successful DevOps Transformation first appeared on TestingXperts.

Content 1. What is DevOps? 2. Emergence of DevOps Methodology – ‘Better Collaboration Between Teams’ 3. Why Should Businesses Adopt DevOps? 4. What are the Benefits of DevOps? 5. What are DevOps Lifecycle Phases? 6. Related Technologies and Practices 7. What are the Tools Used in DevOps? 8. Role of DevOps Engineer 9. Conclusion

What is DevOps?

DevOps is an evolution from the agile model and is an enterprise software development approach aimed at enabling collaboration between Development and IT Operations. This is an effective collaboration of people, process and working product that enables continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) of value to end users.

This DevOps methodology ensures development and operations teams to improve collaboration and facilitates better coordination among them. Primarily, a DevOps engineer works with different IT teams such as operations, development and testing functions by automating and streamlining the CI/CD and deployment processes.

With this modern code deployment approach, the development team submits the application to the operations team for implementation; and the operations team monitors the application to provide the relevant feedback. This methodology helps to accelerate the application delivery by minimizing the risks with continuous delivery and delivers effective feedback with faster and quality releases.

Emergence of DevOps Methodology – ‘Better Collaboration Between Teams’

DevOps is popularly considered as a culture more than a methodology in software development. With the traditional waterfall model, it was difficult for the teams to meet the ever-changing demands of the new IT products with connected devices.

Though the software requirements were well-defined at the earliest, this sequential model failed to deploy the applications faster and could not give efficient results as software testing was done at the end of the development. This effectively lead to the evolution of Agile Methodology.

An agile model is an iterative approach to software development and it focuses on customer feedback, collaboration, and rapid releases. This methodology serves best to address the gaps and ensures good communication between the product owner and developer teams. Though there are many benefits with this model, however, development and operation teams still find some challenges that are well addressed in DevOps. This methodology ensures faster code deployment to production with faster releases and also ensures speed of application delivery with faster time-to-market.

Why Should Businesses Adopt DevOps?

Today’s businesses are moving towards DevOps to overcome the challenges of growing competition with ever-increasing user expectations. This methodology helps in breaking down the traditional silos and ensures speed and responsiveness to production with proper customer feedback. The DevOps practice essentially ensures frequent communication and collaboration between teams as they continue to work hand-in-hand.

With this software delivery approach, businesses can easily automate the regular IT operations with the code development process and combine the workflows of both the teams from the initial design phase till production.

Along with this DevOps, businesses are embedding many technologies such as blockchain infrastructure, distributed databases, Big Data analytics, serverless computing, etc. as businesses continue to shift towards digital business. Evidently, DevOps is the solution to run the businesses with rapid innovation, less time to market, and be sure to get quality applications.

Thus, the implementation of DevOps with the best workflow, test automation and effective practices helps businesses to achieve huge benefits. Some of the benefits include to enable better organizational culture, to enhance the software lifecycle predictability, along with saving considerable time and money by leveraging software test automation.

What are the Benefits of DevOps?

DevOps has emerged as a superior method to deliver quality software faster by decreasing the development lifecycle and maintaining business objectives.

Some of the benefits are:

1. Speed:

Assures and delivers the highest business value and faster delivery time with an effective software development process in place.

2. Improved Collaboration:

Enhances the collaboration between QA, Development and Operation teams with more engaged teams and breaks down silos.

3. Cross-Skilling:

Facilitates opportunity for cross-skilling and self-improvement of various teams.

4. Reliability:

Ensures better quality application updates and infrastructure changes which further ensures reliable software delivery at a more rapid pace.

5. Faster Bug Identification:

DevOps processes help identify and resolve the fixes at the earliest with faster identification of defects.

6. Release on Demand:

Assures to compete with present business market and customer needs with continuous releases and continuous deployments.

7. Manage at Scale:

Enables to operate and manage infrastructure and development processes at scale. It becomes far easier to manage and deploy and test through multiple environments for multiple teams.

8. Security:

DevOps model can be adopted without sacrificing security by using automated compliance policies and other configuration management techniques.

What are DevOps Lifecycle Phases?

The lifecycle of DevOps works involves various stages such as continuous development, continuous integration, continuous testing, and continuous deployment.

1. Continuous Development:

This phase focuses on the planning and coding of the application. The vision of the project is decided and then the code is developed for the application. There is no restriction for the code language, thus the code can be in any language. Once the code is developed, it is moved to the next continuous integration phase.

2. Continuous Integration:

In this stage, the developer frequently commits changes to the source code. And, the new code that supports the latest functionalities is continuously integrated with the source code. As the development is continuous, it becomes essential to integrate and update the code continuously. This specific way of continuous integration helps to achieve the changes faster.

3. Continuous Testing:

In this stage, the developed software is constantly tested with the help of Test automation tools to identify defects. This implies running existing regression suites and continuously adding test cases to that in order to cater to the new functionalities being added. It helps in ensuring that there are no functionality breaks while new features are being added.

4. Continuous Deployment:

In this stage, configuration management tools and/or containerization tools are used to deploy to the test or production infrastructure. Configuration management tools help to establish and maintain the app’s functional and performance requirements. Specifically, containerization tools help to manage consistency in development, test, and production environments. With the help of these tools, the code is deployed on the test/production servers in this phase..

5. Continuous Monitoring:

This is the last stage in the DevOps lifecycle, and in this stage, the performance of the software is constantly monitored. The errors related to functionality, low memory, and app performance are effectively monitored with the help of continuous monitoring tools. This may also involve using Infrastructure monitoring tools provided by individual Cloud providers.

Related Technologies and Practices

Containerization:

Containerization involves the packaging of application along with its libraries, frameworks, and configuration files together such that it can be run in various environments. Today, Docker is the most popular platform that provides for containerization. Containers are becoming an integral part of standard DevOps architecture. DevOps and Docker image management technologies have made it easy for developers and IT operation teams to share software and collaborate easily which further leads to enhanced productivity.

DevSecOps:

Security is an ever-existing requirement for businesses. DevSecOps is the integration of Security testing within the DevOps framework. Thus with DevSecOps, security will be infused throughout the software development lifecycle thus eliminating vulnerabilities as soon as possible in the software life cycle.

MicroServices:

Microservices are often concomitant technology. With micro-services, it is easier for the DevOps teams to increase the speed and agility as individual teams can focus on single functions. Also, micro-services protect the elements from breakage, isolate the defects, and help in fixing them.

Container Registry:

This technology has also become a crucial need for the DevOps teams while working with microservices and containerized applications. The container registry is the collection of repositories that helps in storing container images. A few of the top container registries are Docker Hub, Azure Container Registry and Google Container Registry.

What are the Tools Used in DevOps?

1. Artifact Repositories:

These are repositories of binaries, libraries, DLLs, third party components that may be built using internal or external source code repositories. Some of the commonly used tools in this category are JFrog Artifactory, Nexus Repository.

2. Configuration Management Tools:

This category includes the provisioning and configuration of a server or an environment. It involves the practice of provisioning infrastructure, managing and automating the configurations of various software applications. Some of the tools that come under this category are ansible, terraform, Saltstack, Packer.io.

3. Orchestration Tools:

Orchestration involves automating workflow processes to build, test, deliver and deploy software services. These may be tools installed and managed by the software development teams themselves or maybe SaaS (Software as a Service) based tools. Some of the common tools under this category are Jenkins, CircleCI, Azure DevOps etc.

4. Source Code Repository:

This source code repository refers to the place or hub where the developer’s check-in and change code. This repository effectively manages the versions of the code that are checked in by the developer teams. The tools may be central repository based or more often distributed version control systems. Some of the commonly used tools that come under this category are git, Subversion, and TFS.

5. Test Automation Tools:

An important aspect of DevOps is integration with automated testing within the pipeline. Automated testing ensures faster releases and at the same time delivers quality. Some of the popular tools that come under this category are AccelQ, Tricentis Tosca, Selenium.

6. Virtual Infrastructure:

There are many cloud vendors (Amazon, Microsoft, Google) that sell infrastructure or Platform as a Service (PaaS). The cloud vendors make available APIs that allows programmatically creating new virtual machines or other infrastructure components using some configuration management tools already mentioned above. Some of the service providers under this category are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Role of DevOps Engineer

DevOps is gaining steady demand in IT organizations. The combination of ‘development’ and ‘operations’ is proving to be a huge success. DevOps is contributing to swift software development along with improved team collaboration and efficiency.

The DevOps teams with DevOps engineers perform many activities and ensures faster and quality releases along with ensuring the early market of the product.

The role of the DevOps Engineer is as follows:

– The need for having decent soft skills are critical for a DevOps engineer. As a mediator between the development team and operations team, they communicate with the teams and helps solve problems if any through the support of other team members

– DevOps engineers have the good technical know-how on certain key tools that fall under source control version, continuous integration, infrastructure automation, deployment automation and containerization and thus helps DevOps teams in enabling quality releases

– The DevOps engineer helps develop specific security mechanisms that not only monitor the on-going activities but also safeguard the system infrastructure from any potential threats.

– A DevOps engineer helps in handling automation tools. It becomes the responsibility of the DevOps engineer to coordinate with teams at any point right from the requirements gathering stage till the deployment stage. Infrastructure also needs to be automated with the help of the specific DevOps teams

– Apart from automation, a DevOps engineer is responsible for implementing testing techniques. The main reason being automation and testing are interlinked, and hence it becomes essential for the DevOps engineer to handle the automation and testing activities to ensure faster releases and at the same time quality releases.

Conclusion

DevOps has evolved as an extension of agile methodology and enables effective collaboration between developers and IT operation teams and breaks silos that existed in earlier models. DevOps methodology has many benefits such as ensures team collaboration, speed of delivery, reliability, security ensured with effective test automation practices.

DevOps facilitates modern enterprises to maintain consistency, to innovate rapidly, deliver customer-centric software with enhanced time-to-market. TestingXperts can provide DevOps consulting and implementations services so that you can do an effective rollout of this methodology in your organization.

The post DevOps – A Detailed Overview for Businesses first appeared on TestingXperts.